Twitter No Longer Counts Photos, GIFs, Videos Toward 140-Character Limit (adweek.com) 29
Twitter is finally relaxing its 140-character limit. The company announced today that it will now don't count things like emojis, images against the 140-character limit. Adding quotes, polls, videos will also no longer reduce your characters. From a report on Adweek: The moves don't come as a huge surprise. In May, the company revealed that such changes were likely forthcoming. At any rate, with video and GIFs becoming increasingly important to the social channel, the developments make sense. Social media marketers, no doubt, will enjoy the extra freedom as they try to get their points across to potential customers. "With long-form content on the rise, businesses who can take advantage of Twitter's new offering stand poised to create deep, meaningful communities," said Rod Favaron, Spredfast CEO.
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I still won't use it (Score:2)
I know some people love it, but I am hard pressed to think of anything worth saying in 140 characters or less. I always saw Twitter as like an emergency broadcast system for the Internet, not a form of conversation. Adding an image won't change my view, I have wind in my sails. Just read some of my posts.
Bold experiment (Score:1)
Twitter was a bold as an experiment for democratic debate, but it's only shown that the vast majority of voters are too pig-headed, too arrogant and too poorly-read to logically debate anything beyond what happened in last nights epi
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Twitter was a bold as an experiment for democratic debate
I disagree. Twitter was originally intended as a "micro-blogging" platform that ran over SMS with a web interface. The 140 character limit is from that, and it's the reason Twitter usernames are limited to 15 characters. (The remaining five characters in a 160-character tweet are for "command" codes. The SMS interface still exists [twitter.com].)
It rapidly grew to something that no longer fits that, but it was never an "experiment for democratic debate," it was if anything an experiment in running a social network over S
Re:I still won't use it (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's not that there isn't anything worth saying in 140 characters or less, it's that most people don't have anything worth saying in any amount of characters. Twitter prevents bloviated diatribes, keeping the inanity down to digestible bite-sized chunks.
Ahem... that was 254 characters, TLDR Mr. Bloviated Diatribe!
The chunks are bite-sized and digestible, but when the only thing the platform allows is inane sound bites, wisecracks, and talking points that's all the platform has on it.
(And that one sentence was 173 characters. Nevermind bloviated diatribes one can't even write a single half decent sentence.)
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I know some people love it, but I am hard pressed to think of anything worth saying in 140 characters or less.
Sadly, because of bullshit like Twitter, I'm finding more and more humans incapable of offering an attention span to read or create content longer than 140 characters.
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I see tweeter more like the stock market ticker form of information than indepth information.
Most people who read news will just scan the headlines until they find one that is interesting. Then they will read the article. Tweeter is just a bunch of headlines.
Having space for links will allow people who wants more information a place to go.
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It's a platform for people, who are able to express themselfes in a consise form, without overlong essays.
It begins. . . (Score:1)
OMFG my fingers are running to the keys (Score:2)
and wanting to type twitter.com and post something like right now, after I post this as Slashdot is more important.
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Since when have GIFs and JPGs EVER fit in 140 characters? They'd have to be 3 pixels by 2 pixels. So this makes no sense.
Well, I guess URLs contain characters . which are no longer counted now? Just a guess.
A GIF says more than a 140 characters (Score:2)
Breaking the API again (Score:2)
And so they are breaking the api and abbreviate these tweets with "..." and a link to /i/web/TWEET_ID, locking out all existing apps from properly reading them, even their own apps in slightly older versions.