I wonder how much theyll charge with their gnip rip-off company for us to query these long tweets.
Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets
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Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
But it doesn’t lead to any meaningful discussions. I’ve tried using twitter for some time now, and you end up sounding a lot more angry when you spend the 20 minutes trying to get your thoughts into 140 characters, and you’ll have to use a horrendous amount of abbreviations. There’s no space left for polite "hey, sorry, I disagree with your thoughts on [long name of a project], I’d think you could do [feature] better…
I'm going to go out on what might be something of a limb and suggest that perhaps Twitter is not the place for meaningful discussions, or even, discussion in general. Obviously there's no right or wrong way to use Twitter, but I generally don't follow people who do more than post inane status updates like "i love tacos lol" or links to mildly interesting news articles. For me at least, that's all I want Twitter to be…
I totally agree with you. I actually think that's what Twitter was originally intended for. But I can't help but think about how a huge portion of Twitter has just devolved into a community of angry, underinformed, unqualified pseudo-activists releasing their rage into the abyss. It's amazing how a completely absurd and incorrect statement can be liked and retweeted thousands of times just because it makes for a good soundbyte. Anywhere else, that behavior would be shut down quick. But not on Twitter. It's almost as if the way the platform is designed encourages the behavior. There is no room for actual discussion, discourse, and statement validation. Just one absurd, oversimplified statement that's subsequently dismissed by an equally absurd and oversimplified reply from another user. Over and over again.
I don't think that Twitter was originally designed for real discussion and discourse, but it's become the Social Activist Platform™, and as such, discourse and discussion are almost necessities. In it's current state, however, it's 140 character format unfortunately aids and promotes ignorant and uninformed statements rooted in mob mentality, killing the possibility of any meaningful discussion or discourse, which could benefit many of the conversations that are occurring on the platform.
Twitter wasn't meant for discussion and discourse, but it's community seems to be demanding that it be exactly that.
That's just my (admittedly biased) take.
Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets
#153Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Literally" is not incorrect. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally "Literally" can mean "virtually," or "figuratively."
We need a new word that non-figuratively means "literally", then.
Sorry to reply to my own post. It bothered me that I literally knew no good substitute in English for "literally". Did some research, and the best that I found is the phrase "without exaggeration", which actually seems usable to me and might be more likely to be understood than "literally" is today.
"I got literally hundreds of bug reports today" may not be appreciated correctly (a listener who doesn't know me might think that I got 12 and I'm just whining), but "Speaking without exaggeration, I got hundreds of bug reports today" seems airtight.
Or maybe it's time to import >>wörtlich<< into English.
Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets
#155Good. My biggest issue with Twitter's 140 character limit is it removes all opportunity for nuance. Within 140 characters you can just barely voice and opinion or thought in the most basic terms. Yes you can split your thoughts into multiple tweets but people will typically only focus on the first tweet that really expresses the basis of an idea and that's what will get shared the most. Allowing more wordy and nuance…
brevity is the soul of wit
Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets
#156Microsoft Word used to have a summarization engine. You could specify a maximum length, and it would remove sentences, in a surprisingly intelligent way, to get to that length. Twitter readers now need such a feature. Just because someone sends huge tweets doesn't mean they have to be displayed.
Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets
#157Other commenters seem to be missing a critical point here: tweets continue to have a 140 character display with some sort of "read more" that you click to see the rest. 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 wou…
> Other commenters seem to be missing a critical point here: tweets continue to have a 140 character display with some sort of "read more" that you click to see the rest.
So Twitter wants to be RSS with better discovery. If there were discovery and UX for blogs like there is for podcasts (Pocketcasts, Overcast, etc.), then Twitter wouldn't even have a leg up on RSS at all.
I've often dreamed of a decentralized "Twitter" that allows you to subscribe to any Twitter, Facebook, or blogging feed and makes them all equal, first-class citizens (including the ability to reply/retweet/etc.)
Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets
#158Other commenters seem to be missing a critical point here: tweets continue to have a 140 character display with some sort of "read more" that you click to see the rest. 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 wou…
With this addition they will have officially become a user-focused Reddit. It's certainly not a bad thing but I doubt it's where the Twitter devs saw themselves heading. I'm sure people will continue to write 140 character messages but they'll probably become a minority over time. The bulk of tweets will just become title+link to external content or title+discussion starter.
> With this addition they will have officially become a user-focused Reddit.
I totally disagree. I still find it impossible to follow threads of conversation on Twitter. I'm a software developer and don't consider myself to be an idiot, either.
(Unrelated: I accidentally downvoted you when I was trying to copy-and-paste, and I'm terribly sorry!)
Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets
#159To the people thinking 10,000 characters means suddenly everyone will write blog posts instead of tweets... Have you ever tried blogging? Writing blog posts is insanely hard and time consuming. You'd be an outlier if you could write one good blog post a day. It's not like every tweet is suddenly going to be an essay. More likely tweets will just be slightly longer (200 characters or something) and then there will be…
So, I think you don't realize something very important about how people use twitter. Consider, what the typical number of blogs is that people around you might actually follow - (via RSS or some other means) in the sense that they're subscribed to it, new content appears from time to time, and when an entry appears they see it somewhere at the top of some feed? A feed they have to read through.
I would guess the very high end of what might be considered typical would be 50-70 or something. That is a lot of blogs.
Now let's compare with twitter.
Three years ago, the average twitter user followed 100 accounts.[1]
Here is an example of an article giving 55 "must-follow" twitter accounts [2] - a simple article, saying, hey, subscribe to these 55 sources. Can you imagine someone giving you a list of 55 blogs that you simply have to subscribe to, regardless of who you are or what your interests are - for everyone? That to be in touch with the world, you must follow at least these 55 blogs?
I can certainly imagine it for tech! But, for everyone?
The percentage of world leaders who use twitter is: 80%[3] - outside of the highly reduced format, do you think people care about politics that much? Obama has 68M followers. How many do you think would stick around after even a couple of extended posts? How interesting do you think every last politician is? Because that 68M compares to the total monthly reach of New York Times and all its web presence of on the order of 50 million people. Are people really that interested in not just one, but every last politician's every last statement, than in this highly distilled and reduced form?
Twitter works because of the character limit. That's what allows the average user to follow well over a hundred accounts.
It's that simple.
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[1] this figure was really hard to find, don't know why. http://news.yahoo.com/twitter-statistics-by-the-numbers-1531...
[2] http://greatist.com/happiness/must-follow-twitter-accounts
[3] http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/march-2013-by-the-num...
Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets
#160I have a semi-serious business idea for Twitter. They should charge verified/celebrity users a huge amount to be able to fill in whatever number they want in the followers box. If you're advertising on twitter, you will know the actual number so you're not paying extra. It\ would reduce or eliminate the services that "help" with inflating your follower count, and vain people who care about this stuff get to see a large number next to their name.