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Twitter Tests Doubling Character Limit For Tweets To 280 (theverge.com)
Twitter announced today that it has started testing 280-character tweets for select users. The new limit doubles the current 140-character limit, and is said to help users be more expressive. The Verge reports: "Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people tweeting in English," the company said in a blog post. "When people don't have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people Tweeting -- which is awesome!"
About 9 percent of all tweets today are exactly 140 characters, Twitter says. It's tough to do that on accident, suggesting that users frequently have to edit their initial thoughts to get them under the limit. (It's certainly true for me.) Now Twitter hopes to ease that burden by doubling the character limit in what it calls "languages impacted by cramming," which includes every language except for Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. The report goes on to note that the "140-character limit was originally established to reflect the length of SMS messages, which was how tweets were distributed prior to the development of mobile apps. SMS messages are limited to 160 characters; Twitter reserved the remaining 20 for the username," reports The Verge.
About 9 percent of all tweets today are exactly 140 characters, Twitter says. It's tough to do that on accident, suggesting that users frequently have to edit their initial thoughts to get them under the limit. (It's certainly true for me.) Now Twitter hopes to ease that burden by doubling the character limit in what it calls "languages impacted by cramming," which includes every language except for Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. The report goes on to note that the "140-character limit was originally established to reflect the length of SMS messages, which was how tweets were distributed prior to the development of mobile apps. SMS messages are limited to 160 characters; Twitter reserved the remaining 20 for the username," reports The Verge.
240 characters is more than anybody needs brag about their kids, pets, vacations, food, and/or political views.
Did I miss anything that people actually post about?
Now that idiot will have twice as much to say.
Millennials have regressed to the level of cavemen, and have abandoned language in favour of pictures. If they want to communicate they'll send a picture via Snap Chat. If they want to express how offended they are they'll post an animated gif which illustrates their self-righteous outrage.
The knock on effect is that software user interfaces have been reduced to pictograms to communicate the functionality. Nasty menus with words that describe the functionality have been all but stripped away, leaving things like the ribbon UI with lots of big pretty pictures to communicate to the millennial. The previous branching Start menu has been replaced by tiles with more big pretty pictures.
Twitter, your additional character allowance is not welcome here. It's non-inclusive, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic and will be used by Trump supporting white-supremacists. This extra character allowance has caused me great offence and I must now retreat to my safe space.
you know whats actually amazing?
they created a system, with a limit of 140 characters, got huge numbers of users but running their system was still more expensive than what they could profit from the users - this despite the complexity of the system being simple as can get compared to contemporary facebook.
oh and if you're outside of usa and are wondering why the 140 character limit in the first place? well, twitter was originally like a one-liner webpage plugin, which was coded terribly but had a good amount of highly visible seed bloggers to start using it - but the limit came from that you could order tweets to your phone delivered via sms.
which was possible because USA had/has a system where you pay for received SMS so sending them was free for twitter - in most of the world sender pays for spam and receiving sms messages had always been free. this was in a timeframe where you could actually get instant messaging for few bucks a month already if you were living in europe(through gprs) too.
I say it was coded like shit because otherwise they would have been in profit from year 2 from all the webtraffic(and ads made possible by said webtraffic). also them spending money on useless marketing people and useless executives has had an effect on their poor profits vs. spent money. now the reason why it's all so ridiculous is that they had a fixed size limit on messages which was tiny - the server costs should have been miniscule but they weren't.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Like, wow, man, totally radical!
Take an arbitrary limit, and change it to a different, arbitrary limit. But only for "select" users. Wow.
The point of the limit, and Twitter's only USP, is that messages have to be short. The original limit was based on text-messaging (SMS), of course, but that hasn't been relevant for a long time. They could drop the limit entirely - and just become a rather strange blogging platform.
Twitter has other problems. In particular, their tendency to political censorship has already pissed off everyone who doesn't subscribe to the progressive world view. However, having started down that road, reversing course would piss off the progressives. On top of all of that, their corporate expenses are just nuts - they don't need (and cannot pay) thousands of employees, to run a simple messaging platform.
Changing the tweet length really is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
280 is clearly too much. Users might be confused.
I say reduce it to 80 characters. If it was good enough for fidonet taglines -
If this is an attempt to reverse the decline in Mankind's attention span, then it's too late.
TL:DR
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
That's funny. When Twitter was first launched, I read that the 140 character limit was defined by SMS Text messages for mobile phones.
Whatever the reason, I've never been able to figure out the attraction of Twitter. I opened an account, followed some people, and every time I check, it just looks like a random mess of information. I can't remember the last time I actually found something useful on Twitter. What am I doing wrong? How do others make Twitter useful?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Oh wait, twice zero is still zero.
It's been a long time since I've used twitter, but last I remember, usernames go against your character count. Want to tell @pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis something important? Well, now you're down to 95 characters. Want to retweet something and tag them? You're probably SOL.
Furthermore, they should stop counting the letters in hashtags and instead just limit how many you can use. There are a lot of really inefficient things that Twitter does that they could clean up...
"Twitter- now with twice the self-serving, narcissistic drivel!"
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I can't remember the last time I actually found something useful on Twitter. What am I doing wrong? How do others make Twitter useful?
1) You won't find anything useful on Twitter. It's the confetti of the internet.
2) You're not doing anything wrong.
3) They don't.
Dump your account and you won't miss a thing.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...