Twitter Will Extend Its 140 Character Limit On September 19th (theverge.com) 135
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Beginning September 19th, [Twitter] will cut down on exactly which types of content count toward the platform's 140-character limit. Media attachments (images, GIFs, videos, polls, etc.) and quoted tweets will no longer reduce the count. The extra room for text will give users more flexibility in composing their messages. Twitter first announced plans to stop counting extras like photos, videos, and user polls toward the limit back in May, but gave no firm date on when the shift would occur. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment when contacted by The Verge. The date comes from two sources familiar with the company's business, but plans for the rollout could change. Another new adjustment to the character limit is that usernames will no longer count when they're at the beginning of replies, giving users additional room for discussion. It's unclear whether all of these changes will occur simultaneously; certain content types may gradually stop counting against the character limit in stages. But the company will at least kick off the move next Monday.
Proverbial (Score:5, Interesting)
As the Dutch proverb goes, "a cat in a tight corner can make odd jumps". Twitter is in a tight place, to which this move may IMHO be a witness.
"For Sale: Baby shoes, Never worn." (Score:5, Interesting)
"I didn't have time to write a short letter so I wrote a long one", is an old aphorism. Writing tightly and editing concisely takes skill and wit. Hemingway once wrote the shortest novel on a dare: "For Sale: Baby shoes, Never worn."
Re: "For Sale: Baby shoes, Never worn." (Score:4, Interesting)
Good point. Conciseness was / is one of Twitter USPs, so to say, and now they ditch it. Diary of an announced catastrophe, this is going to be.
Re: (Score:3)
At the same time, Twitter forces everything to be reduced to a soundbite. Something we could use less of.
Re: (Score:2)
Was your comment in less than 140 chars?
Nice.
Re: (Score:2)
At the same time, Twitter forces everything to be reduced to a soundbite. Something we could use less of.
Yes, but the world is full of soundbites. Arguably, almost all news is really just extended soundbites (or things of similar depth). Unless you're doing a 15-minute+ extended feature story on something or a 10,000-word essay, you're often not really getting into any complexity around an issue. The 5 or 6 paragraphs typically devoted to a "story" often oversimplify to such an extent that perhaps a 140-character summary would be preferable, along with a link to an actual extended essay on the topic.
Twitt
Re: (Score:1)
This change seems reasonable though.
Being able to quote a full tweet for context and reply makes sense to me, not counting media does to a point too (though it looks like people just post text of longer posts frequently).
Note: I don't use twitter, but it seems reasonable to define content as actual text and allow that to be 140 characters on the face of it.
Re: (Score:2)
For sale: web site, never profitable.
It's about time... (Score:3, Insightful)
...that a company with an online service stops acting like a cellular texting service.
Limits are even worse to deal with when they are artificial.
Then again, so are people.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:It's about time... (Score:4, Insightful)
No. No thank you. We don't need another blogging service - Twitter is unique in its tight limits and those limits do provoke some good discussion while cutting down on the meaningless waffle. I can't count the number of Medium.com posts I have read which could be summed up in a couple of sentences, and thats what Twitter excels at.
You can still have meaningful discussions, but you do NOT get to post a wall of text and walk away - it takes effort to post a wall of tweets, during which time people may reply to individual tweets, and that is awesome.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It will slowly and surely turn in to a facebook clone.
Re: (Score:1)
Most people post drivel instead of taking advantage of the short limit. Hardly anyone can clearly say something novel in 140 characters. Instead, we get whines about Awful Politico-X, screenshots of longer Facebook rants, and hip-fired rants about ambiguous tweet two-in-a-series-of-ten. Twitter's limit has driven waves of people trying to devise clever soundbites, but largely just beating tribal-affiliation drums.
Re: (Score:1)
You might want to consider following less terrible people on Twitter.
Re: It's about time... (Score:1)
You incorrectly assume that I follow anyone on Twitter. My exposure to it is pretty much exclusively what other people find good enough to link to, plus the flood of garbage sent in response to those messages.
You are following other people (Score:2)
You incorrectly assume that I follow anyone on Twitter. My exposure to it is pretty much exclusively what other people find good enough to link to
Then you are in fact following said "other people", even if said following is through a mechanism other than Twitter's follow button.
Re: You are following other people (Score:2)
What on earth are you going on about? I consume non-Twitter media, therefore I should stop following the horrible people on Twitter that I don't follow, and instead use my non-existent Twitter account to follow better people?
Re: (Score:2)
I consume non-Twitter media
Nothing is being consumed [gnu.org].
use my non-existent Twitter account to follow better people
The word "follow" existed before Twitter. You view media published by particular people. Therefore, you follow those people.
Re: You are following other people (Score:2)
What part of "follow[] on Twitter" is unclear to you, you obnoxious idiot?
Re: (Score:2)
I accept that you don't follow people on Twitter. I was pointing out that you still follow people without doing so specifically on Twitter. If the people you follow off Twitter link you to garbage on Twitter, and you don't want to read that kind of garbage, then perhaps you could stop following them off Twitter.
So to rephrase Anonymous Coward: You might want to consider following less terrible people on and off Twitter.
Re: (Score:2)
I'll take your suggestion that I stop following CNN and BBC under advisement.
Re: (Score:2)
Odd; I thought Twitter's business model was being the Internet's primary source for meaningless waffle.
Re: (Score:1)
Odd; I thought Twitter's business model was being the Internet's primary source for meaningless waffle.
Exactly.
Re: (Score:2)
They have a business model?
Re: (Score:2)
Odd; I thought Twitter's business model was being the Internet's primary source for meaningless waffle.
They have a business model?
More importantly: They have waffles?
Re: (Score:2)
Having a limit makes sense, even a rather small one, but 140 is just too small. They should go up to 300 or so.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I can tell you our social media people will probably be shying away from longer tweets to show on air...
How about not showing any tweets on TV? It's useless clutter blocking the content that viewers actually want to see.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Of course there are numerous "tweet longer" services that will turn a longer post into an image, so it's not hard to work around if you choose to
Re: (Score:2)
I think 140 might have been to leave room in the SMS-to-Twitter gateway for authenticating your Tweet or for posting a Tweet containing characters outside GSM's 7-bit encoding [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Time for Small.com (Score:2)
I can't count the number of Medium.com posts I have read which could be summed up in a couple of sentences
Medium.com should start Small.com and encourage users to create an abstract of each article. Then Small.com would just have the abstracts.
Re: (Score:2)
@I @agree @with @you. @This @is @a @great @idea @that @will @make @it @much @easier @to @formulate @longer @tweets @.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep. A service where the signal to noise ratio is only envied by SETI will become slightly less useless. Now hipsters can use full spelling to describe their outrage at Urban Outfitters being sold out of that perfect frumpy sweater that they wanted to buy!
Re: (Score:1)
Please take a moment to reconsider.
Having limits is one thing (along others), which make art interesting.
Games, and computer games even more so, are based around artificial limits.
As for people, well, at least you got a nice punchline.
Twitter (Score:1)
So what's the difference between twitter and any other blog site?
Re: (Score:2)
They'd better tread lightly here. (Score:5, Insightful)
The genius of the 140 character limit is that you always finish reading a tweet before your brain has time to fully process how utterly boring and trivial the bullshit you just read was. If you give users the ability to pad out their vapid brain farts into essays that take actual time to read, people might finally start grasping what a monumental heap of pointlessness twitter really is.
Re: (Score:1)
If you give users the ability to pad out their vapid brain farts into essays...
That's called Facebook.
Re: (Score:1)
Twitter's business model isn't built around lazy journalists riding out the last gasps of the TV news era half-assing their jobs by shoving whatever random shit they found on the internet that afternoon onto the screen, it's based on serving ads to billions of idiots who think billions of other idiots need to know that their dog just farted. Any positive, tangible contribution to humanity is incidental and purely unintentional.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Which is why I watch neither.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, the news gets its news from twitter. It has its uses.
That is as much a failing of TV news as it is a success of Twitter.
Growing pains (Score:4, Insightful)
It's curious how many big companies, when they reach a certain age, think that it's a good idea to take whatever make them big, and change it. It's probably the human instinctive rejection of simple inaction.
Twitter is famous because it forces people to be concise. Tweets are cited in news outlets because they are concise and so provide the short text bite that is easy to digest by the public. Nobody is going to cite a tweet that is longer than the article.
So basically, what they are doing is giving a step to get closer to a mailing list service. Way to go!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
In my meaningless opinion, this is because Twitter made the horrible decision to sell stock. A stock company needs a continuous, profitable, growth model to survive. Sure Twitter can try to make money by advertising but I can't see how it could have gotten any bigger than it was before selling stocks. Google expanded but by diversifying as a company, not by somehow making being a search engine more profitable.
Re: (Score:3)
It's almost impossible to grow to "Internet scale" through organic growth -- you won't be able to provision ahead of demand. Companies that want to be the Next Big Thing seek venture capital, and VCs want an exit strategy, which means an IPO. Google was no exception in that regard.
Re: (Score:2)
That sounds like investor/share holder FUD...
Twitter is fine. They just aren't growing at some exponential rate that is demanded by those... people.
Re: (Score:2)
Twitter is NOT fine. If you look at a 5 year history, they've been doing nothing but falling.
Re: (Score:2)
Not true.
www.statista.com/statistics/282087/number-of-monthly-active-twitter-users/
Unless you have better stats.
Re: (Score:2)
I do have better stats - it's called THEIR STOCK NUMBERS.
Re: (Score:2)
That's not a valid argument for the number of users.
The stock is going down because the RATE of users is going down.
That's not the same thing. If you need an explanation as to why, go ask someone else.
Re: (Score:2)
companies have to change. You see once you hit your growth wall you stop growing, which makes you unattractive to wall street, which trashes your company.
wall street demands unlimited growth in all businesses. if your company stops growing you will pay for it.
Re: (Score:2)
That might be true for companies that don't actually produce value, like Twitter. Twitter exists as a conduit for delivering eyeballs to advertisers, and must continue to grow and stay in the forefront, or those eyeballs go to the new guy that is in the forefront and the company shrivels like a piece of fruit left on the counter too long. See: Myspace.
Companies that actually produce goods of some kind don't necessarily have the same pressures.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
It's only stuff like links that are excluded, the message still has to be short. The headline is wrong.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Nobody is going to cite a tweet that is longer than the article.
It doesn't really surprise me any more that some /. users don't even bother to fully read the summary. What is sad is how the preponderance of moderators don't seem to be reading the summaries either.
Re: (Score:2)
Kinda like /. ? I swear when I load /., i can feel the javascript shuddering through my system.
What's so special about September 19th? (Score:1)
Couldn't they make that available on other days too?
Re: (Score:1)
Look, if you know a better way to celebrate National Butterscotch Pudding Day [nationaldaycalendar.com] then I'd love to hear it.
Re: (Score:2)
How about grabbing a kiddie pool, a whole bunch of butterscotch pudding, and a very attractive member of the gender you are attracted to?
All messaging services are the same (Score:2, Insightful)
The more time goes on, the more all the messaging services are becoming the same. Even today the differences between Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Co. is already rather slim, as they are all essentially used for the same things: post text, images or video to a group of people or the public. Even that fundamental 140 character limit on Twitter is constantly worked around by posting images of text or linking to sites like Twitlonger. The only real difference is the client, some client make it rea
Re: (Score:3)
What we are seeing here is essentially see the slow and painful reinvention of email with broadcast functionality. I could even see that turning into an open standard in another few years, as it's rather pointless to have so many apps doing the same thing and be incompatible with each other.
Dude, you got yourself a start-up idea there, do you realize that ? Contact me if you do .
Re: All messaging services are the same (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I know you're joking, but remember that Slack just got a multi-billion dollar buyout offer from Microsoft for making IRC a bit more pretty and extensible...
Re:All messaging services are the same (Score:5, Funny)
Hmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Re: (Score:2)
Hmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
81 char. TL;DR
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Where is the huge difference? You have a linear news feed where you can post messages and others can comment on your messages. It's the same as everything else. Back when Twitter started it was a different thing, the 140 characters were all that you got and there was no integration of pictures, but that has been eroded for years, pictures, video and Co. are now all normal on Twitter and natively supported. Even the page layout is mostly the same with friends and photo boxes on the left and news feed on the
Re: (Score:1)
Yes, that's what broadcasting means. The problem is that email never had native broadcasting capabilities, it only got bolted on via mailing lists, which lacked a standard interface and made subscribe and unsubscribe extremely cumbersome. The other big problem with mail is that it lacked persistence, if you subscribed to a mailing list in the mid of a discussion, you would miss out on everything that happened before. You could look it up in a mail archive, assuming somebody provided it, but it was again a c
Swashbucklers (Score:2)
September 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. The extra characters in Twitter should really move the needle on human progress starting immediately.
Colour Change (Score:5, Funny)
Other hot Social Media news:
Twitter is planning to change their blue colour from #63aeee to #63aeed - date to be confirmed, but two sources claim it'll be October 12th.
In related news (Score:3)
Maybe that's one silver lining of prevalent obesity; it will make our phones look smaller.
Re: (Score:2)
Still 140 (Score:2)
Most people are missing the point. The 140 limit is still there. You will just no longer be penalized for including other content. As a heavy user, currently this was a big bugaboo because you never know how much a picture or link is going to reduce your count. I try to budget about 6, and sometimes it hits that, sometimes it goes clear up into the teens instead for no apparent reason. Its really annoying to have to change your message to make it look like it came from a 1337 D00D just to squeeze 5 characte
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, drat. I guess we have to stick to image links to jpegs of walls of text.
Yup. That still works, and hyperlinks to webpages still work. If you really want >140 chars, you are still free to do those things, and if people don't want to read that much, they are still free to not RT, like, or follow you.
How about machine-to-machine communication? (Score:1)
Security and performance concerns aside, of course....
desperation (Score:2)
Twitter is desperate to preserve itself as the premier platform for social signaling, manufactured outrage, and trolling; a platform where a character limit ensures that no rational argument or thoughtful analysis is possible. Keep going, Twitter, you're doing great!
I have an idea! (Score:2)
How about coming up with a business model?
I've run a few businesses and figuring out how to make some money was usually something we did.
Re: (Score:2)
There was a business plan but they never counted on making it to the IPO.
More MPAA ammunition (Score:2)
This is just another culture-shattering consequence of piracy!
Flexible users? (Score:2)
I, for one, look forward to someone bending and twisting a few of these new, flexible twits.
different limits (Score:1)
At least I'll be partially cured of my OCD.. (Score:2)
With Twitter, I almost always try to have a tweet with correct English spelling, grammar and punctuation, and which takes up exactly 140 characters, using at most 3-4 hash tags. (Yes, I'm on the spectrum.)
What am I going to do now? I hope I don't get Twittagoraphobia with all the space it will shower me with.
Twitter Will Extend Its 140 Character Limit (Score:2)
...to 141 characters! yaay!
THIS IS THE LAST FUCKING STRAW (Score:2)
leaving Twitter for good
goin' back to Baudot on paper tape
shoulda stayed on the farm
shoulda listened to my old man
back to the howlin' old owl in the woods
huntin' the horny back toad
Eventually the message body won't count either (Score:2)