Twitter To Extend 140-Character Limit For Tweets (recode.net) 174
An anonymous reader writes: According to Re/code, Twitter is doing away with its 140-character limit for tweets. The company is currently planning on increasing the limit to 10,000 characters, though the final number may change before they roll it out. "Twitter is currently testing a version of the product in which tweets appear the same way they do now, displaying just 140 characters, with some kind of call to action that there is more content you can't see. Clicking on the tweets would then expand them to reveal more content. The point of this is to keep the same look and feel for your timeline, although this design is not necessarily final, sources say."
10K ought to be enough for anybody (Score:3)
I wonder what ramifications this will have on peoples' data plan usage.
Re:10K ought to be enough for anybody (Score:4, Insightful)
Minimal compared to what they would have paid to send the messages by SMS (before unlimited plans).
Re:10K ought to be enough for anybody (Score:5, Interesting)
Minimal compared to what they would have paid to send the messages by SMS (before unlimited plans).
Before "before unlimited plans", SMS used to be free. The phone companies didn't start charging for SMS until the late 90s.
First, there was no cost as it was part of the GSM standard, and the packets went in-between other traffic, creating no extra load. With GSM being the only system that had text messaging, there was no talks of charging anything. If anything, it was meant to generate traffic like "please call me when you can", and promote increased talk time.
But then the phone companies went to extra steps to be able to block SMS, so they could charge fees for not blocking it, backwards as it sounds.
And as if that wasn't enough, they went one step further, and started counting SMSes and where they terminated, so they could charge extra for both the amount and the source/destination.
Now they're offering "unlimited" SMS. Which was free in the first place. And most of them don't even offer unlimited SMS, but charge extra for sending or receiving SMS across borders, or requiring an extra monthly fee for that privilege on top of the "unlimited".
It's a rip-off.
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Free SMS was the situation long before phones had access to the Internet, let alone the WWW. I had free SMS on my mobile in 1995, but I didn't get a mobile with internet access until about 3 or so years ago.
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Doesn't sound backwards at all if your intent is to make money off of people. I get that it would be nice to not have to pay for it but that's not how capitalism works. And the fa
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10K words should be enough to tweet your 40 page (double spaced) English essay @ your teacher.
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Maybe he's Chinese, you insensitive clod!
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I just tested it, and Twitter counts code points. An emoji takes four uint8_t code units in UTF-8 or two uint16_t code units in UTF-16. This means it counts each Chinese character as one character. However, a character with a combining diacritic counts as two. I can't give examples here because of the whitelist that Slashdot implemented to shut out bidirectional control characters [slashdot.org] and what used to be called ASCII art.
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Because it's not April 1st.
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So something exploded. That means what exactly?
We have satellites in orbit, did they measure anything? H-Bombs are triggered by nuclear bombs. The least I'd expect is some radiation.
So wake me when you catch some rays.
Re: HOLY FUCK! North Korea has the H-Bomb! (Score:3)
Because there aren't enough North Koreans to throw the damn missile.
Why worry?
So... (Score:5, Interesting)
Is Twitter only threatening suicide or do they really mean it?
Already has photo attachments; why not text? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see it as "suicide" any more than being able to attach photos to a Tweet was. You'd get the headline in the Tweet and the article in an attached text file.
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"I don't see it as "suicide" any more than being able to attach photos to a Tweet was. "
We had email newsletters doing all that for over 40 years.
I think you're forgetting how people use mess (Score:2)
aging systems with multiple text-entry fields. You know, like they'll start a message wherever the cursor goes, then tab to the next field when they run out of space. Or they'll fill the first 140 characters with salutations and declarations of importance. People suck at titles, headings, and summaries. The (questionable) beauty of twitter is to force people to write only short, complete messages, easily read at a glance.
De-twittering twitter makes it email, and a twitter feed with 50 headlines saying "Im
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a twitter feed with 50 headlines saying "Important: read this" is pretty useless.
Unfollow anyone who can't be taught how to write a headline.
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Whoooooshh!
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So basically email?
LIke a "reply all" email. :)
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
It makes sense because it's what a lot of tweets already do. Headline and a link to a longer article. All they are doing is providing a space for the longer article on their site, rather than having the user go to a different site to read it. The Twitter app already opens external sites in its own built in browser so that the user doesn't need to switch away from it.
Why not keep people on the site and grab the be associated revenue?
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Those "headline" tweets are what I hate most on twitter and I actively avoid accounts that consist of nothing but click-bait to pull you to a website. If I wanted to read a 2 page article I would be browsing the web in a dozen better ways than reading a twitter feed. If I'm reading twitter, I want something short and to the point. I certainly do not want 10k characters, and I do not want to be forever deciding "do I open up this to read further, is it worth it, or is the meat of the comment in the firs
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I'd rather keep my rollover characters, especially if they don't expire.
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This is exactly what Twitter is doing. This is a direct assault on TwitLonger and other services that let you write long articles and tweet short links to them with a blurb of text. For all their API efforts, Twitter has shown time and again that they don't really like people using the API. It's there, but more so Twitter can see what people use it for and then implement those ideas, locking out the services that originated them, than for
Why suicide? (Score:2)
I have never used twitter. The thing that made me completely uninterested in using it was mainly the 140 character limit. I get the impression that is something from the days of flip phones with tiny screens and having to type with a number keypad.
I figured as well that the 140 char limit would just make intelligent conversation impossible. So there would be zero content worth following.
At 10000 chars, maybe I'll sign up for an account - maybe.
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I get the impression that is something from the days of flip phones with tiny screens and having to type with a number keypad.
In fact, before twitter was an "app" or much of a web site, it was a group SMS service. Send a text to 40404 and all of your "followers" get a text with the content. Later they added aliases (usernames), which allowed @ replies to send a message to a specific person.
It wasn't until late 2006 that you could sign up without a cell phone number involved
done before... (Score:4, Insightful)
Twitters call to fame was quick and concise little blurbs. If someone wanted a full page essay, they would have posted it on livejournal, blogger, or whatever blog/diary/journal site that already exists.
Expand it to 240, Hell, even an even 200... but making it Yet Another Journal Program.... ugh.
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and getting those blurbs as "free" sms(recipent paid, according to recipents plan).
true, it started as an oneliner system. but the character limit wasn't random.
however, in typical internet fashion, 99% of users don't really know or care what twitter was made for. neither does the management.
what is AMAZING is how FUCKING EXPENSIVE twitter is to run. I mean, such a system - even with all the users - should not really cost the losses the company is making.
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gotta pay the sales teams somehow.
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If a sales team doesn't make enough to cover the cost of the sales team, it's time for a new sales team.
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After the move to longer tweets, just start inserting ads selected by Twitter. Then make people have to pay to not see the ads. Say $10/year. Problems solved.
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Then make people have to pay to not see the ads. Say $10/year. Problems solved.
Except your user base suddenly dwindles to a few dozen.
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Bingo! Some MBA trying to justify his or her paycheck? Just because it is technically possible, it doesn't mean it should be done.
Re:done before... (Score:5, Insightful)
You didn't even RTFA.
They aren't going to increase the word limit. They are simply going to provide an 'extended tweet' functionality where you can add more text as an 'add-on' to your tweet.
You can already link images and shit in your tweets; and a lot of people just post images containing text. This would keep people from doing that. I can't fathom why morons are complaining about this.
Re:done before... (Score:5, Funny)
> I can't fathom why morons are complaining about this.
Strange as it may sound, I have found that the typical Slashdot public is extremely conservative concerning technology. Whenever a (successful) company changes its product or experiments with features, many slashdotters would reply that they are not going to use it, so it has to be crap. Or, they complain how the existing product / version is superior.
Luckily, the world is not made of slashdotters, and companies and people keep experimenting and trying out new things. And yes, some are indeed crap, but without changing anything, there wouldn't be progress.
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Strange as it may sound, I have found that the typical Slashdot public is extremely conservative concerning technology. Whenever a (successful) company changes its product or experiments with features, many slashdotters would reply that they are not going to use it, so it has to be crap. Or, they complain how the existing product / version is superior.
It depends what you mean by "technology". Most IT product launches are basically packaging old technology in a shiny new format, and us geeks only care about the actual technology, so we generally dismiss such products as shiny toys. Moreover, we're bitter because we weren't taken seriously back in the day, when we were doing essentially the same things that's all the rage today, i.e. having a social life online.
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Next Headlines... (Score:2)
Fox News to Create a New Channel Targeting Progressives
Valve to Start Selling DVDs on Steam
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Buzzfeed Considering Long Form Printed Publication
Cracked is way ahead of them. The De-Textbook [amazon.com]
this is good for press blasts (Score:5, Interesting)
Right now people have taken to including a picture of text in their tweet when announcing big stuff. This is a disaster. It doesn't wrap well for different screen sizes and it makes things hard those assistive devices for poor sight, as they are better at reading text to them than communicating pictures.
Something must be done. Maybe this is the right fix.
After we fix that we can go on to eliminating vertical videos.
Re:this is good for press blasts (Score:5, Insightful)
Something must be done. Maybe this is the right fix.
After we fix that we can go on to eliminating vertical videos.
I don't get why cell phone manufacturers don't have a feature to record a proper horizontal video while holding the phone vertically. These phones have 10 Megapixel cameras in them now. It shouldn't be that difficult to grab the center 1920 by 1080 out of a much larger field for video.
Camera orientation must match that of device (Score:5, Informative)
I don't get why cell phone manufacturers don't have a feature to record a proper horizontal video while holding the phone vertically.
Because the Android CDD [googleusercontent.com] requires the camera to have the same orientation as the screen. Section 7.5.5 (Camera Orientation) states:
So in the CDD's terms, what you're asking for is a way to crop 9:16 video down to 4:3 while recording it.
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However such a crop makes far more sense with video than with stills.
With stills recording the still at the native resoloution of the camera still is managable. So cropping to zoom or to change the aspect ratio means throwing away information that you could otherwise have kept. You can always crop after capture.
With video on the other hand you are forced to throw away most of the data from the sensor since the storage and encoding pipeline can't cope with all of it. Adding functionality to chose what you th
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Re:this is good for press blasts (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:this is good for press blasts (Score:5, Funny)
Because it won't actually solve the problem of terrible vertical videos, which is that they are vertical.
In fact, it would probably encourage more of them to be created by morons who would feel validated by the new feature.
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Why are you upset about other people's content? It doesn't matter. Don't watch it.
*sigh*
Because some videos you'd actually like to watch are ruined by being in a shitty little vertical format.
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It would also really narrow your field of vision - it is as if you're zooming in about 2 times.
Facebook is killing them. (Score:3)
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You can block people from following you, and I think they have a private mode now so only your followers see your tweets.
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Facebook also has such "privacy settings". Don't trust them. Only put stuff on Twitter/Facebook that you want the world to know, no matter how strict the "privacy settings". After all, everyone that reads it can retweet your messages and it's out in the open anyway. Twitter's privacy settings may have bugs that allow others to see your stuff after all. Foreign law enforcement (specifically the NSA of the US Government) may have a direct back door into Twitter, and be reading your messages regardless of your
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Not "may". They do and have for a long time now. We know that from PRISM and other programs divulged by Snowden.
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Suggest rebranding (Score:2)
limitations of form concentrates and enhances (Score:1)
twitter is giving up essential part of what makes twitter successful.
limitations of form concentrates the minds and enhances the power and effect of content.
that is why (usually, not always, it is true) poetry is greater than prose and a play or movie with time limits will beat up a mutipart tv drama, etc etc.
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limitations of form concentrates the minds and enhances the power and effect of content.
And it will continue to, if Twitter sticks to the philosophy of its current experimental interface. 140 characters will still be shown in the feed, with a link to view the extended tweet. Don't feel like writing more than 140 characters? Then don't! I'm sure Twitter will include some kind of 'legacy' config option where it will artificially disallow you from writing more than 140 characters if you enable the setting.
Re:limitations of form concentrates and enhances (Score:5, Insightful)
twitter is giving up essential part of what makes twitter successful.
No Twitter is giving up something you like about it. If Twitter we a community project like Wikipedia it would be successful, but it isn't. Twitter is business and one that is losing money, which is by definition not successful.
Twitters core problem is people tweet links to places not twitter. twitter needs your eyeballs to stay on twitter if they are going to make any money with ads. So they can't have all their users just linking to external content. That is bad business. Look at what facebook does they work very hard to pull as much external content as possible into the feeds whenever people link something outside, why because it chances are if you can produce a story summary and image people will just look at it there. Just like on Slashdot nobody reads the TFA, nobody clicks that crap on facebook they read whats there and scroll on down.
Twitter can't do that in 140 chars. So they need some place for the content to go, that is also twitter.
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That 'essential part' is exactly the part I hate about Twitter, forcing everyone to condense everything into a badly-readable, tag-infested blurb. They took a miserable concept from news media (sound bites) and applied it to everyone, killing off thoughtful discussion in favor of polarization.
Short attention spans bit Twitter officials... (Score:2)
"Bob Snodgrass reporting from San Francisco.
Twitter officials scheduled a news conference to explain the rationale behind the much higher limit. But unfortunately, people stopped paying attention after 45 seconds, so we don't really know why they increased the limit.... ooh, look! A kitten video! Bob Snodgrass signing out."
Constraint + Desire = Art (Score:2)
Consider that the limit of 140 characters is a blessing. It inspires us to be pithy, to craft our utterances to achieve maximum effect.
Art thrives when it is constrained by limits of some kind. An example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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I seem to remember someone trying to tweet a whole movie frame by frame..... Oh there it is http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/tr... [yahoo.com]
They didn't get very far.
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Whoosh. [I think.]
The point is that even Sarah Palin, when confined by constraints, can create art.
Peace out.
ASCII Art Finds A New Home (Score:2)
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Yeah, I guess they'll have alot of fun filtering out all the ascii porn.
And they're going to call it... (Score:3)
email!
Crap (Score:2)
Twitter: the confetti of the internet, now with even more contentless crap!
Hmm. (Score:2)
When letters
Seven score suffice,
Trim the excess,
Be concise
Burma Shave
Insist on Haikus (Score:2)
This would be much better - count syllables and enforce a 5-7-5 structure on all tweets.
So Twitter wants to be a Facebook? (Score:2)
I like Twitter for a reason, and that boils down to its short messages. To me its what every RSS aggregator tried to be.
If its contents becomes anything like the spam i get in Facebook, i'll have to find an alternative that technically minded people like.
Finally! After all... (Score:2)
Oh what times we live in! (Score:3)
This must be the most momentous, earth-shattering event since Instagram allowed rectangular photos! My predictions for 2016:
- Snapchat snaps to be viewable for 6 months after opening.
- Vine clip limit extended to 90 minutes.
- Dice completes gradual 'stealth beta' transformation of Slashdot.
- Civilization altering asteroid strike leaves Usenet newsgroups as most important social media.
Copyright infringement (Score:2)
Overnight there is going to be zillions of articles copy-pasted illegally[*] and that's going to create a mess. I'm concerned that it will make the business of media and news even more worthless. It will also make it even easier for people to self-publish as getting a blog or domain main is a small barrier to entry, which is a good thing. Yet journalist college degrees etc. and credentials will even get more meaningless.
I'm pissed that newspaper physically shrank and are rarely read anymore. Give me back ne
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Please, no (Score:2)
Incorrect length? (Score:2)
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My thoughts as well. Personally, I would say go to about 300 characters while not having images or reply tags ("@user") counted against that limit.
That would give plenty of space to write out a full thought while still keeping it brief.
Yawn. (Score:2)
Call me when I can embed a VM* in a tweet.
* virtual machine, not voicemail.
Tweet Mail? (Score:2)
Re:Changing Requirements (Score:5, Insightful)
Twitter with large tweets is just an average blog.
Twitter with 10,000 characters is just Facebook.
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Right! What I love about twitter is how concise it really is. You have to think about what you want to say to make it fit and often this causes you to realize you probably don't need to say it in the first place!
I can see this being the death of my twitter usage.
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Twitter doesn't have a real name policy, just a policy not to mislead. Twitter has one-way following, as opposed to mutual friendship. And somehow the FSF feels a lot more comfortable with Twitter [fsf.org] than with Facebook [fsf.org].
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As if one wasn't already enough.
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I was sending messages up to 10K characters on the (then arpanet) as early as 1984. Beat them to the ability to exceed 140 characters by 32 years!
Seriously, I never got the appeal of this 140 character thing. It seems like that creates pressure in the direction of thought-free trivialities rather than meaningful depth of communication.
Captcha: Capacity.
As a Fidonet user from back in the BBS days I can sympathize...
It's almost like the 140-character limit was a holdout from the TAP paging protocol. I had an alphapager for work and later got one for myself before I could afford a cell phone, it was a very convenient medium if one was mindful of the character limits.
It also reminds me of that Doctor Who episode in the current era of the show where they ended up in the alternate universe and first met the Cybermen- I wonder if the Twitter founders thou
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As far as I can tell, that is the appeal.
before twitter and facebook, LJ and other blogging sites had a pretty active community. The format allowed you to post links to "Which timewasting personality quiz are you" and the like but also had a format that encouraged people to actually say something meaningful. And peo
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It seems like that creates pressure in the direction of thought-free trivialities rather than meaningful depth of communication.
The thought-free trivialities come from the people who don't have much to say that merits more than 140 characters. The solution is not to subscribe to them and their output need not concern you. Everyone else uses twitter to convey single points of information; concisely. If you want to write/read something longer with meaningful depth then twitter isn't the medium for that, any more than a radio traffic update is the place to discuss sustainable transport policy. Go write an email, read a blog or join
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I believe SMS is 160 chars in some countries and 140 in other, or it depends on text encoding.
Re:More noise on the Internet (Score:4)
It may be observed
in a general way
that life would be better, distinctly,
if more of the people
with nothing to say
were able to say it
succinctly.
-- Piet Hein
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But at least they'll do it concentrated in one place so it's easy to ignore them.
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And here I was thinking that the hairpiece thinks big!
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140 characters equals 280 bytes. About the maximum amount of information the hairpiece can process in one tx.
Re:An IDIOTIC decision by Twitter (Score:5, Informative)
140 characters equals 280 bytes.
Windows UTF-16 user spotted!
The 140 character limit in Twitter is based on SMS, which is max 160 7-bit characters or 140 8-bit characters.
(Later, it was extended to also support 70 16-bit characters, which allows for Asian languages or emojis, but as soon as you use a single one, the max SMS length drops.)
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Thanks. I stand corrected. I was not thinking of Windows and of UTF-16, however. Just before posting the comment, I had been programming in Java; a Java character is the equivalent of two 8-bit bytes.
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"140 characters is more than enough to express a complete thought!"
Indeed. Parkinson's Law: 'rubbish expands to fill the available space'.
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Or Parkinson's Parkinson's Law: "r-r-r-u-b-b-ish expand-d-s to fill the a-a-a-vailable s-s-s-ap-a-a-c-e."
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self-obsessed people prattling on about nothing important, I'm impressed someone could monetize narcissism of the masses
But now they can prattle on at length...stupefying, boring, length.
No longer with their posts about their "AWESOME breakfast" be limited to 140 chars, now they can shit out pages and pages of twaddle detailing their bagel and the egg and the coffee...for 10,000 characters.
In other words, twitter just invented something called a"forum".
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No, forums can have threads. This is not organized.
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No, forums can have threads. This is not organized.
Just wait until next year when they come out with their AWESOME NEW feature called Twitter-Threads.