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Twitter Officially Expands Its Character Count To 280 Starting Today (techcrunch.com)
Twitter is rolling out an update around the world to allow users to post 280-character tweets. The company first announced the controversial plan to move beyond its traditional 140 characters back in September, noting at the time how a longer character count allowed users to express more of their thoughts without running out of room to tweet. TechCrunch reports: At the time of its original announcement, the company cited data backing up its decision that referenced how the character constraints impacted users differently, depending on their language. Twitter said that those who tweeted in languages like Japanese, Korean and Chinese were able to express around double the amount of information in a single character, compared with users who spoke English, Spanish, Portuguese or French, for example. In today's blog post about the public launch of 280 characters, Twitter aims to assuage people's fears that their timelines will fill with expanded tweets. The company said that during the trial period, people continued to tweet below 140 characters most of the time -- after the novelty of being able to use more characters wore off. Specifically, Twitter found that only 5 percent of tweets were sent out with more than 140 characters and of those, only 2 percent were over 190 characters.
make Twitter great again
Twice the amount of incoherent ramblings from the 6 year old occupying the Oval Office. How about limiting it to 14 characters instead? Would at least make it more interesting.
but I think we can all name some people who shouldn't express more of their thoughts...
So, people were worried an extra 140 characters would fill up my feed? When half of the tweets I see have giant photos filling up ten times as much space, I'm hardly worried about an extra line and a half a text.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
I have diarrhea running down my leg. Now THAT'S interesting.
Twitter was a company that was born by accident. The technology was a side project that took off on its own. The four founders were more interested in playing musical chair with the CEO spot. The revenue model came years after burning through VC funding. One founder pulled a Steve Jobs by quoting Steve Jobs, listening to the music that Steve Jobs liked, dressing up in a Steve Jobs uniform (same clothes, simple style), and staging a Steve Jobs comeback after starting another company. Mark Zuckerburg called Twitter a clown car that fell into a gold mine. Another 40 characters won't change this.
Source: "Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal"
US citizens will get longer presidential addresses from today.
Trump doesn't have the attention span to type that many characters.
covfefe!!!!
I cannot remember that Twitter was ever used for insightful communication. Now, the typical message might change from three (abbreviated) words plus a hundred repetitive Emoji to three words plus two hundred repetitive Emoji. Sounds still as useful as the communication promoted by the "Yo" app.
With having to protect us from such extremist terrorist hashtags like #DNCLeak and #PodestaEmails, one wonders how they will manage.
Another twitter article from BeauHD. Get a clue dude, no one here cares about twitter.
I think we just reached criticality, guys. Imagine the dose of Trumptweets doubled.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
#thiswilltakeawhile #thiswilltakeawhile k k
god I hope this doesn't kill the "dot dot dot" part of The Late Show. It's my fave.
Skip the middle increments and go straight to 640 characters.
Is that you, Gabe?
2008? Really?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Twitter is now double plus good with double plus good message lengths.
Let's hard code that in.
Seriously, though, the SMS platform Twitter is using a Short Messaging System originally used by submarines to avoid being spotted, and it's only so big. Packet sizes do put an upper limit on the protocols, and 128 characters is more of a reference to routing overhead. 280 also fits in, but was avoided for submarines as the technology to triangulate the sender generally failed under 128.
You can stuff a 640 character packet in a larger one, but then you have to chunk the data.
I for one welcome our new long-winded overlords.
sigh
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It's my impression that the reason for the limit was that this utilized extra space in the packets which are sent from towers to phone and back, with "Are you there?" and "Yes, I'm here." type messages. They're used to enable phones to link to nearby towers for connecting to the phone network.
Admittedly, sending pix (apparently quite popular) vastly exceeds this size. I don't tweet but I have on occasion sent and received text messages, which I presume is handled similarly.
And here I thought "Yo" was a joke. IIRC, I saw it on Silicon Valley (the show).
Most apps are programmed for the 140 characters. I'm pretty sure most people, for the time being, will be tweeting at the 140 characters.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
> I cannot remember that Twitter was ever used for insightful communication
You're probably not following insightful people. There is good content out there:
https://twitter.com/DalaiLama
Now the stupid things people say will be even LONGER!
YAAAAAAAAAAAAY!
*burp*
Meanwhile anyone with anything longer to say can just take a screenshot and tweet that.
What a bunch of fucking morons.
280 for most people, 35000 for a select few.
/. post too long, didn't read.
You're following the wrong people then. There are a lot of scientists on twitter: I'd say twitter has been more useful to me professionally than linkedin or any other website aside from pubmed or google.
When is it coming out?
I've lost my toenail clippers.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Why not be like the limited SMSes with Twitter?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
You were so preoccupied with whether or not you could that they didn't stop to think if you should.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
... and I'm pretty sure most bots, will for the time being will be tweeting at the 140 characters.
ALTER TABLE tweets ALTER COLUMN text varchar(280) NOT NULL
Please provide a list of ten insightful people to follow.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
It doesn't seem to work for the automatic cross-posting feature from Facebook to Twatter.
Phil Plait - Astronomy, Astrophysics and General science
David Frum - Principled (ie, not a party mouthpiece) conservativism
The Marshall Project - Criminal Justice System watchdog
Picard Tips - Management and Life tips from the perspective of Jean-Luc Picard
Benjamin Dixon - Principled liberalism/progressivism
These are more specific to where I am, but there's probably a local equivalent or three where you are:
Fred Melo, Reporter - Local beat reporter who's on top of everything
Arif Hasan - Local football analyst with a lot of detailed knowledge
Humerous, but often as insightful as they are funny:
Riker Googling
Chaucer Doth Tweet
Bloom County
I am from a time of 16 bit processing my friend.
In soviet russia rubles troll me.
Best President we have ever had. I think he is up there with Lincoln and Washington. Stop drinking the haterade.
@NuclearAnthro is also very... interesting... on nukes and the north korean arms race.
There are a bunch of biologists I follow that would be interesting if you're a biologist.
@ASlavitt has some interesting if biased healthcare reform points.
Green mountain, you might enjoy @swear_trek and @NoContextTrek