It would be an interesting experiment to watch. It can take Twitter much ahead or it will break Twitter completely.
Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets
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Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets
#52Facebook is a walled-garden, Twitter is not. The humans in the middle of these two giants, are all confused.
Meanwhile, Twitter needs to figure out how they are preventing spammers and spam-bots from infiltrating the environment where humans supposed to tread...only if, they wish humans to use their service.
Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets
#53Restricting users to 140 characters wasn't just a good idea because of SMS character limits, it also forced users to create content that had a far greater chance of being shareable.
The traditional blogging platforms that came before Twitter generally failed as broad-base social media platforms because of the walls of text people would write. If you're an average person, nobody wants to read your wall of text about some childhood experience, but people might be interested in your one-liners about news, celebrities, friends, etc.
I think the changes that are causing them to consider a 10,000-character limit are:
1. A larger percentage of Twitter traffic is celebrities/marketers, and people trying to connect with celebrities/marketers (not friends connecting with friends). Character limits don't matter for this traffic because quality/virality is either guaranteed (celebrities/marketers) or irrelevant (consumers trying to connect to celebrities/marketers).
2. It's difficult to sell text as short-form shareable content now that everyone's sharing images, gifs, and really short videos. If the text isn't going to be shareable, they might as well lift the character limit and expand its utility as a general feature.
Personally I like the idea. The way I use Twitter is to see what public figures and organizations are saying publicly, so a higher character limit is 100% upside for me.
Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets
#54We built http://writerack.com to help take care of this problem.
It is puzzling why Twitter refuses to encourage 3rd party applications to do peripheral things while they still get the data.
That way, they focus on the core experience for most of their users.
10 000 and it becomes a poor attempt at medium. 140 characters allows text to be like images where you can skim.
Occasionally, you see tweetstorms and decide if you want to "view more"
Anyway, it's their turf.
Do check out http://writerack.com and have fun with it until it is no longer useful :)
Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets
#55Finally! I have been wanting them to remove that for a long time now. Twitters biggest problem is that they are a protocol router more than a destination. And so while people use it to find content they consume this content somewhere else out of reach for twitters add engine. Now that people will start writing on twitter this will mean a lot more time is spent on twitter consuming content on twitter and reading ads o…
What you see as Twitter's biggest problem, I see as one of its greatest strengths.
We already have five-craptillion blogging platforms and I feel this change would morph Twitter into yet another one.
I can understand the motivation, but I'm not a fan of social networks tendency to be THE PLACE WHERE YOU DO EVERYTHING NOW.
Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets
#56Finally! I have been wanting them to remove that for a long time now. Twitters biggest problem is that they are a protocol router more than a destination. And so while people use it to find content they consume this content somewhere else out of reach for twitters add engine. Now that people will start writing on twitter this will mean a lot more time is spent on twitter consuming content on twitter and reading ads o…
What you see as Twitter's biggest problem, I see as one of its greatest strengths. We already have five-craptillion blogging platforms and I feel this change would morph Twitter into yet another one. I can understand the motivation, but I'm not a fan of social networks tendency to be THE PLACE WHERE YOU DO EVERYTHING NOW.
I am talking about Twitters biggest problems from the point of whether it will survive you talk about it from the point of whether it's a better product experience.
Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets
#57So what's the difference between twitter and tumblr then?
Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets
#58Twitter'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.
Yeah, my first thought was "The Death of Twitter has been announced". Although, I left Twitter for G+ quite a while ago precisely because of the character limit.
If G+ serves as a valid alternative to Twitter for your needs then you were using Twitter differently than most. Twitter's value is in its network, not the ability to share longform content, and G+ can't touch Twitter as a social network.
Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets
#59I like Twitter because it forces people to be concise. There are already plenty of places on the web where people can post long thoughtful articles or op-ed pieces.
Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets
#60The Twitter engineering team is probably hating this decision. I bet a lot of their infrastructure is built around the assumption that tweet.txt is short :) This has huge implication on the data schema, caching, search, etc.
If that's the case, that's their own fault. Seriously.
As an engineer, you can hardcode your assumptions or make them parametric. I get that 140 chars has been a core part of the Twitter identity, and maybe there are some infrastructural aspects that have to be hardcoded to optimize for that. But if they've got `140`s sprinkled all over their code base because that was the assumption of the day, god help them.