Twitter Will No Longer Count Usernames Against a Tweet's 140-Character Limit (phonedog.com) 77
An anonymous reader quotes a report from PhoneDog: Last year, Twitter updated its service so that photos, videos, and other media wouldn't count against your 140-character limit. Now it's excluding another feature from that limit. Twitter is now rolling out an update that excludes usernames from your tweet's 140-character limit. This means that you can tag as many people in your tweet as you'd like, but still have 140 characters for your actual message. With this change, Twitter is also tweaking how usernames are shown when you're @ replying to people. Now you'll see "Replying to" followed by user names at the top of your tweet, rather than a long string of user names in the tweet itself. Tapping this will show you exactly who you're replying to. This update is now rolling out to Twitter.com as well as the Twitter apps for Android and iOS.
Great... (Score:4, Funny)
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What Twitter *really* needs to do: (Score:5, Insightful)
What Twitter really needs to do is change from hearts-only, to a visible thumbs-up count (same as the heart) and a visible thumbs-down count.
Why?
Because politicians -- pretty much all of them -- sit there with these asinine tweets that have "hearts" on them in the thousands, sometimes tens of thousands. And there is no indication whatsoever from the people who disagree on the tweet; you have to wade through unending BS to see that, and there's no telling how far you'll have to go.
But if a politician says "X", and it's 10,000 thumbs-up / hearts, and 150,000 thumbs-down, now you know what you're looking at. And for that matter, so does the politician.
I don't care -- at all -- about other folk. But I think Twitter is doing the nation a direct disservice by going hearts-only on politician's accounts. I don't think it would hurt anyone to see both sides of the opinions of their tweets either (goes for slashdot comments, too.) Politicians, though... that hearts thing is straight-up misleading at times.
Anyway. I doubt they care. But I thought I'd speak up here. (Yeah, I sent them a support item on this. It disappeared into the usual darkness over there.)
Wouldn't it be nice if some politician posts X, and you could actually show them what you thought? I think so.
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Ohh, hearts and poo emojis...
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I care about what people think, when they see twitter posts. When all you see is likes, what you have is an echo chamber.
And while I take your point, believe it or not, the problem is that huge numbers of people care about those posts, and use them to leverage their own views and attitudes.
Just because something has flaws (and Twitter certainly does) doesn't mean it has no effect on the world we live in.
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But then people would have to deal with rejection when their insanity hits reality and they have to see that while some hundred like minded loonies agree, a few ten thousands of sane people consider them batshit insane.
Can't have that in the safespace that Twitter has become!
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Dont forget about the fact that when something true as you have said is posted. they mod it to hell to prove your point. pathetic.
Re: Great... (Score:1)
Mango mussolini? Ill ask for that next time im at olive garden. Sounds delicious.
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No, he's just as batshit insane as many others on Twitter.
Personally, I go there whenever I need to stroke my ego. It's a bit like watching afternoon "reality" shows where you can feel good about not being as crazy as those idiots.
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We live in amazing times (Score:5, Funny)
We should all be thankful for the phenomenal advances in computer technology that have made it possible to accommodate the extra bandwidth and storage that will be needed for this.
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BASED
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I guess now people are free to include enormous tweets that contain every username they know.
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Thats going to be fucking epic! I might have to create an account to test this theory. I wonder how many usernames until they will cut it off.. If social media didnt leave such a bad taste in my mouth i might actually try. But twitbook and twatface are both garbage. IRC is the original "Social Media Sites" And still alive and kicking..
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What I'm curious about is how media channels will handle this. Currently they print out the whole tweet. Not printing out who it is addressed to is incomplete, but this can and will be easily abused.
Not that I use or care about Twitter, but this latest move seems ill advised.
next... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Write in textese and we'll autoexpand for you into more than 140 characters."
"We'll only count the gzip-compressed message length against the 140 character limit, not the original message."
"We'll only count the CMIX-compressed message length against the 140 character limit, not the original message."
Twitter is realizing that the 140 character limit is a millstone around their neck and is too short; they'd like to go to at least a few hundred bytes, but they are afraid they're going to destroy their brand and be perceived as just another blogging platform, so they come up with all these "it's 140 characters, but..." tweaks.
Tagging the world (Score:3)
I remember the good old days on Usenet when advertisers and trolls discovered that the posting software allowed them to crosspost their junk to every single newsgroup in existence with no limitations or drawbacks whatsoever. The term "spam" was invented during the ensuing fun.
Now Twitter is going to unleash the same fun with tagging users for trolls and advertisers on their service. Its nice to see someone who still remembers and appreciates those good old days. You will no longer need to follow someone to get their garbage in your timeline. Ah, the memories... I can hardly wait!
What's the point of 140 characters to begin with? (Score:2)
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What's so bad about longer tweets? Or are they no longer tweets then? Very confusing....
Do you really want me to spend 2000 characters describing my lunch or that amazing bowel movement I just had? Really? Send me your email...
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Do you really want me to spend 2000 characters describing my lunch or that amazing bowel movement I just had?
In 140 characters or 2000, I'd rather you don't describe it.
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But 140 characters are easier to ignore than 2000.
Just compare the average goatse-posting with the average racist rant here. Both are annoying, but the goatse one is easier to scroll by.
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Mine will limit you to 80-characters so it only uses a single line on a video teletype. (my BBS's "wall' worked like that)
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People already use Twitter for long messages all the time, but due to the character limit they have to do it by posting images of text or other ugly workarounds. If Twitter wants to give priority to short messages, that's fine, but forcing people into workarounds is just stupid. They had the same thing already with photos, people used TwitPic and other workarounds for a long while until Twitter finally started to allow images. It hasn't killed Twitter, quite the opposite, it made it more versatile and usefu
Tweet a headline and the body's URL (Score:3)
Why can't you have tweets that are much longer - say 2000 words, or a whole magazine article?
You can. It's called posting your article on a pastebin, wiki, blog, or other site, and linking it in a Tweet. TwitLonger [twitlonger.com] is a pastebin specifically for Twitter users. Or if it's your own site, the Twitter Cards feature [twitter.com] lets you add <meta> elements to control how the link appears.
Don't post images of text. Use TwitLonger.
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Because everyone posts their tweets via SMS. Didn't you know that?
Also, Twitter users have *extremely* short attention spans. They cannot be expected to read that much.
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tl;dr
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My pet peeve with Twitter is that replies / conversations are a second class citizen on their platform.
no limit ? (Score:3)
so I guess I can use all of "War and Peace" as my user name :)
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Just use a bot to generate usernames based on the words you want to use, and string multiple usernames together.
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Damn! you guessed my password.
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My username is a hexdump of the lasted film, to look up my username you just need a copy of that same film and convert it to hex. Once you've done that you can get at this seemingly free data.
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Can you even fucking read?
nipping this one in the bud (Score:2)
So you can't (or don't care to), even under coercion. Good to know.
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Does the quota exception apply only to legitimate handles, or any handles? If the first, what if you start with legitimate handles and a user name expires? Does a message that fit before now not fit?
If the second case, @then @just @by @handlizing @all @words @you @indeed @could @send @yuuuuge @messages.
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If the second case, @then @just @by @handlizing @all @words @you @indeed @could @send @yuuuuge @messages.
I plan on using twitter to publish War and Peace by using nothing but @usernames. Here's the first bit:
"@Well, @Prince, @so @Genoa @and @Lucca @are @now @just @family @estates @of @the
@Buonapartes. @But @I @warn @you, @if @you @don't @tell @me @that @this @means @war,
@if @you @still @try @to @defend @the @infamies @and @horrors @perpetrated @by
@that @Antichrist- @I @really @believe @he @is @Antichrist- @I @will @have
@nothing @more @to @do @with @you @and @you @are @no @longer @my @friend, @no @longer
@my @'f
Buffer overrun exploits (Score:3)
255 character limit (Score:2)
I'm still using Pascal.
But... (Score:3)
... these changes aren't expected to have any impact on Twitter's overall signal-to-noise ratio.
Oh wonderful (Score:2)
I have two twitter accounts. Actually, I have one and my cat has one too. One of the true arts of twitter is keeping your post down to 140 characters. It's difficult sometimes.
I've also found that using fewer words on slashdot usually gets me modded up more than when I drone on and on endlessly.
I assume people get bored at some point.
And sending a message to too many people at once can get you in trouble. I once sent an e-mail to about 30 different people right after I left one job and then I went on a
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Yeah, keeping it short can be pretty difficult sometimes. It's a useful skill to have. For example when you need to tell someone something without wasting much time, like when you are in a hurry.
One time I wrote a long email to someone. And they only skimmed it and then asked questions that were directly answered in the email.
Ever since, I've been keeping my messages short so no one can claim that their pet piece of information was not included in my email. For example, that one time someone asked a really
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yes
What am I missing... (Score:2)
Does this mean my username can be Hyades1 thegodamnedestsmartguy everandunquestionablythebestabuserofcharacterlimits imposedbyplacesliketwitterwhereideasgotodie isgoingtohavethebestesthandle everinthehistoryof tweetstorming sothere?
It would have looked better, but Slashdot apparently needs spaces between at least some words or it won't allow the post.
Anyway...this should be fun.
Tweet (Score:2)
Killing me (Score:3)
"Twitter Will No Longer Count Usernames Against a Tweet's 140-Character Limit"
All this innovation is killing me! What's next, uppercase letters?
I'll take Twitter's signs of desperation for $500, (Score:2)
I don't know why this is news, but ok. I'm still not going to log in to Twitter except to get up to date news on how late my train is going to be from the local train group. Honestly I'd rather we just went back to RSS or Atom feeds
I feel sorry for user: @the (Score:1)
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Suddenly trying for the username @me isn't so great anymore.