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Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

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Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#191

Post by derefr »

smt88 wrote: post #180
Animats wrote: post #156

Microsoft 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.

I think it's very risky to do something like that with someone else's words without consulting them. Imagine a satirical tweet with exactly the wrong "unnecessary" sentence removed. Suddenly your life is ruined because you said something that makes people angry.

It could render the summary live to the poster as they edit their post. Then, if you see a "bad" summary, you can go back to the drawing board.

Not as nice as being able to write the summary yourself, but certainly an interesting single-player game.

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#192

Post by pbreit »

dangoor wrote: post #33

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. 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…

If going beyond the 140 visible limit (or however many it ends up being) is highly discouraged (by the rest of the content being highly unlikely to be seen), I could see this working OK without lessening the magic of Twitter too much.

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#193

Post by derefr »

nikolay wrote: post #44

I can't believe that there are so many backers of the old limit! Don't you guys hate that you have to always compromise on punctuation, select shorter (but less precise) synonyms, and other just to fit into the story that Twitter was trying to push all this time, but which wasn't the reality (of people using Twitter via SMS)? Okay, now, Twitter goes to another extreme - from too short, to too long. I'm fine with shor…

I'm a backer of the 140-char limit because I read Twitter but don't post on it. Concision is good for readers at the expense of posters.

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#194

Post by derefr »

dilap wrote: post #9
enginn wrote: post #2

You see this now, whole paragraphs of a noteworthy book punctuating a timeline, people taking screenshots of text, or otherwise cluttering up my Twitter with textual soundbites in the guise of a JPEG a.) These are not very accessible b.) I am too lazy to transcribe / OCR these c.) It defeats the purpose of Twitter d.) It would be far more handy to have big text blobs like this in a Tweet's JSON schema Something like…

But imposing those extra costs to being verbose encourages people to be concise, unless they REALLY need the extra words. Make the words cheap, and twitter will turn into just another prolix platform in a sea of noise.

Not if there are tools that abstract away all the difficulty. Type 10K chars into a box; hit post; magically the first 140 show up as a text and the rest as an image.

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#195

Post by derefr »

justJanne wrote: post #132
jasode wrote: post #4

Well... some back-of-the-envelope math. Assuming average characters-per-word of 4.5[1] and also add 1 for space/punctuation for a word unit of 5.5: 10000/5.5 = 1818 words. 1800 words @ 250 wpm average reading speed is ~7 minutes. A 10,000 char (7 minute article) expansion looks to me like a "micro-blogging" platform rather than "tweeting". I'm guessing it all goes back to Twitter trying many things to become bigger t…

By the way, your statistics are for English. For German, where we have 14.3 characters per word on average[1], we get: 10'000/14.8 = 676 words. 676 words @ 250 wpm is 2 Minutes 42 Seconds. A 2½ Minute article is very short, like a short comment in a newspaper, and would fit very well into a microblogging site. [1] http://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/sprachratgeber/durchschnitt...

I would think max wpm should go down as word-length increases, no?

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#196

Post by bmm6o »

michaelmrose wrote: post #109
bmm6o wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This response tactic is tedious every time it comes up. "Tweets r 2 short" is never a valid complaint unless the limit is below 16 characters?

This is a non argument. Dismissing an argument out of hand as invalid because you say so adds nothing to the discussion. Feel free to expand that to an actual argument

All I'm saying is that the tired "count the characters of the comment that says tweets are too short to contain a complex thought and point out that it fits within a tweet" method of argumentation doesn't prove anything except an ability to count.

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#197

Post by Wingman4l7 »

gregmac wrote: post #168
Wingman4l7 wrote: post #165

Makes a lot more sense to just "fix" what they've already got -- stop counting @ mentions, hashtags, and URLs as characters. If URLs didn't count, that'd mean the death of URL shorteners, which would mean no more link rot.

Yeah, I'd like to see this ... so long as they #limitTheNumber of #hashtags and @mentions you use #so #you #cant #cheatthesystem.

People will always try to cheat, they're doing it now with [continued 1/2] -style tweet-chaining.

Counting @ mentions means that any reply is immediately handicapped (although, for a broadcasting-style platform, maybe that was the whole point).

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#198

Post by pinaceae »

oh yes, the spam it allow will be beautiful.

twitter spam has been of limited value due to the constraints.

would be more useful to move links, @mentions, etc. out of the character limit.

but hey, if they do it, it opens the opportunity for another unicorn that will be the snapchat of twitter.

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#199

Post by cableshaft »

mrpoptart wrote: post #155
tedajax wrote: post #137

Good. 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

Not even a legend like George Carlin was witty 100% of the time.

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#200

Post by derefr »

Wingman4l7 wrote: post #163
dacox wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't really understand Twitter. I have an account and have followed ~50 people and organizations I find interesting, and all I see is floods of re-tweets of people I have no interest in.

You have to turn off retweets manually for every single account you follow, unfortunately.

Never knew you could do it at all; thanks!
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