Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

recode.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 305 posts

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

#221

Post by gcr »

dabernathy89 wrote: post #217
smt88 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 "Twitt…

Ask 99.9% of Twitter users what RSS is, and I think you'll have an idea of the "leg up" that Twitter has. * Not to mention, even if folks knew what RSS was, they don't necessarily want to host their own blog.

Twitter already was tech jargon just a while ago. Maybe we just need the right marketing campaign. RSS = "I'm Ready for Some Stories!", the Oprah way: http://www.backinskinnyjeans.com/2006/09/how_to_explain_.htm...

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

#222

Post by smt88 »

dabernathy89 wrote: post #217
smt88 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 "Twitt…

Ask 99.9% of Twitter users what RSS is, and I think you'll have an idea of the "leg up" that Twitter has. * Not to mention, even if folks knew what RSS was, they don't necessarily want to host their own blog.

Ask 99.9% of Sticher/Pocket Casts/Overcast/iTunes users what RSS is. They'll have no idea, and yet those apps rely on RSS to subscribe to podcasts.

The application can obfuscate the underlying technology. You don't need to know what RSS is to use it every day and love it, just as you don't need to know about DNS, TCP/IP, or most other internet technologies to enjoy the web.

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

#223

Post by dajohnson89 »

logicallee wrote: post #208
yeukhon wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow the hype and when I was an active user I would get frustrated with my tweet limiting to so few characters. here is what I had to do: 1. write tweet, fuck, over limit 2. abbrev words, fuck still low on limit 3. remove spaces, fuck still low on limit 4. remove words and punctuations, thinking "fuck so this is what search engine feels like when one stems words", not my tweet is so not English 5. fuck stil…

I guarantee you that your audience wasn't frustrated by the fact that you had to jump through those hoops. You think all those politicians and celebrities and thought leaders don't have trouble fitting things in 140 characters? I'm not being too verbose, but I've just written 292 here. :)

Agreed. And editing is the hardest (but most important) part of writing.

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

#224

Post by cpeterso »

pjc50 wrote: post #166
Laaw wrote: post #131

I've begun wondering if there's a market for recreating original technologies that have evolved beyond their original intent. For example, a new site that allowed you to broadcast up to 140 character messages.

I keep joking to people that I want to start rotatedfloralheartbullet.com (.com), a social network where you're only allowed one character, but you have the whole unicode space to choose from.

Evan Williams founded Blogger (no character limit) and then Twitter (140-character limit). After rotatedfloralheartbullet.com's one-character limit, the logical conclusion is Bitter with one-bit posts. :)

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

#225

Post by ksk »

recursive wrote: post #220
ksk wrote: post #160

I 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 lar…

That would make followers even more meaningless.

How so?

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

#226

Post by teaneedz »

ThomPete wrote: post #48

Finally! 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…

it's a short-term fix. also, the details will likely introduce UX issues when so many others could have been addressed. this, along with a non-reverse chronological timeline is a product pivot with lots of risk. maybe it'll work out, but I'll use it less. I'd rather invest in time elsewhere based on where Twitter is headed.

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

#228

Post by return0 »

- Tweets are not titles. Soon they 'll have "Click here to read my thoughts on X" / "Click here to read my response to Y" situation. That's not twitter, it's RSS.

- Content creators/websites that use twitter to funnel users to their websites will not use this feature.

- Tweetstorms can be solved much more elegantly (e.g. click to expand "continuation tweets")

- A tweet is a single sentence. Human brains have limits.

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

#229

Post by Laaw »

cpeterso wrote: post #224
pjc50 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep joking to people that I want to start rotatedfloralheartbullet.com (.com), a social network where you're only allowed one character, but you have the whole unicode space to choose from.

Evan Williams founded Blogger (no character limit) and then Twitter (140-character limit). After rotatedfloralheartbullet.com's one-character limit, the logical conclusion is Bitter with one-bit posts. :)

1

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

#230

Post by dabernathy89 »

smt88 wrote: post #222
dabernathy89 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask 99.9% of Twitter users what RSS is, and I think you'll have an idea of the "leg up" that Twitter has. * Not to mention, even if folks knew what RSS was, they don't necessarily want to host their own blog.

Ask 99.9% of Sticher/Pocket Casts/Overcast/iTunes users what RSS is. They'll have no idea, and yet those apps rely on RSS to subscribe to podcasts. The application can obfuscate the underlying technology. You don't need to know what RSS is to use it every day and love it, just as you don't need to know about DNS, TCP/IP, or most other internet technologies to enjoy the web.

Ok, that makes sense, although the content creators for iTunes, etc, still often have to find out what RSS is.

I'm still not sure what your point is - you said Twitter is trying to "be" RSS, but that's just the format, not the application. Twitter is not trying to aggregate content from elsewhere, either.

Post reply on HN