31–40 of 305 posts
Twitter's limit is too low, but it does have a certain appeal, and I'm following a lot of smart people that express a lot in 140 chars. Would be happy if this limit was raised to 250 chars. But raising to 10,000 chars would probably kill Twitter for me.
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Without the ability to format the longer text, 'Tweets' will just end up being unreadable.
To me, that actually sounds pretty great. One thing that's nice about Twitter is that it's fairly skimmable. All of those "1/ Some thought", "2/ some thought continued" threads damage that. Combining them into a "My thoughts on... read more" tweet would be much nicer.
If they implement the feature like that, which is implied in the article, this would be a big improvement to Twitter in my opinion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like this idea, or let users filter by what they want to see. 200 character, 500 character, 5000 character. It still seems like twitter is trying to find their niche. The 140 character limit is long past its purpose, but it's also kind of a defining characteristic of twitter. It forces brief comments and an easy-skim timeline, at the expense of real conversation or information exchange.
> The 140 character limit is long past its purpose What was its purpose and why is it long past it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like this idea, or let users filter by what they want to see. 200 character, 500 character, 5000 character. It still seems like twitter is trying to find their niche. The 140 character limit is long past its purpose, but it's also kind of a defining characteristic of twitter. It forces brief comments and an easy-skim timeline, at the expense of real conversation or information exchange.
> The 140 character limit is long past its purpose What was its purpose and why is it long past it?
We’re all used to the 140-character limit by now, but do you know how it started? Here’s a little history lesson for anyone wondering why they’ve got to condense their thoughts into 140-characters or less – and how to get around the limit without turning off your followers.
The origins of the 140-character limit Once upon a time, long long ago… a group of young programmers whipped up a program that could send SMS to and from a small group of recipients.
This blossomed into Twitter, a web- and mobile- based messaging system that lets users send short messages – known as tweets – to one another.
So why the 140-character limit?
Twitter was (and still is) a service that relied heavily on mobile-messaging. Sure, you can send and receive tweets on your computer, but a huge draw of Twitter in the early days was its ability to be accessed from mobile phones.
And since the worldwide standard length of SMS (or text messages on phones) is 160-characters, the founders of Twitter thought it wise to stay within that bounds so as not to inundate people’s phones with 3 or 4 staggered, delayed, or even partially missing 4-part messages.
140-characters was chosen as a good length, leaving 20 characters for the username of the sender. This way, anyone receiving a tweet via SMS would get the whole tweet in a single text message, with nothing spilling over into a second or third message that pops up minutes later.
http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/twitter-basics-why-140-cha...
Some of the most interesting ideas I've seen on Twitter were in tweetstorms, which is a pretty nasty and ugly hack itself. Proponents of the 140-char limit usually cite some notion of terseness and thought-density, but I see more half-formed ideas and deliberate grammar/spelling mangling to make things fit. That's not terseness, that's gray-matter-powered lossy compression.
But I'm also one of those crazy people who uses Facebook like others use Twitter - I don't write whole essays but 140 chars is like thinking through a straw.
(Side note: I also have a pet theory that Twitter's problems with epic shitstorms/political flamewars stems from the fact that you have people arguing politics/economics/important things with each other in 140 chars or less)
Twitter's limit is too low, but it does have a certain appeal, and I'm following a lot of smart people that express a lot in 140 chars. Would be happy if this limit was raised to 250 chars. But raising to 10,000 chars would probably kill Twitter for me.