Why did this make the front page of HN?
Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
41–50 of 196 posts
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#42When all else fails, turn your product into a spamvertising platform.
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#43The fact that it took this long for them to make such an obvious change speaks to how afraid they are (were?) to challenge core assumptions about the product.
Maybe they were still accounting for the tiny percentage of SMS users.
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#44The beauty of twitter is to tweet with concise messages. I'd be disappointed if this 140 characters restriction got removed.
I find it quite frustrating. I can easily say what I want on other platforms because I can write what I need to without worrying about every single word. Twitter makes me stop and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and finally get something that fits in 140 and makes sense for the most part after the third read if you understand me and all the context surrounding the thing I said. I suppose it's at least partially gener…
It's not a bit shortage, it's an attention shortage.
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the destination is separate header data that is used in routing and not considered part of the message body Right but how could Twitter have put data into the separate header in an SMS message? They can't do that. Hence the 140 character limit (the 160 hard maximum for them being able to put into a message and then minus 20 characters for commands).
Actually it's possible to put up to 11 alphanumeric characters into the sender field.
Possible, but would make the user experience worse as then they couldn't reply to the text, if they wanted to respond (send a tweet back, etc.) they would have to go out of the message, find the Twitter number, open it up and reply there.
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#46The beauty of twitter is to tweet with concise messages. I'd be disappointed if this 140 characters restriction got removed.
I find it quite frustrating. I can easily say what I want on other platforms because I can write what I need to without worrying about every single word. Twitter makes me stop and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and finally get something that fits in 140 and makes sense for the most part after the third read if you understand me and all the context surrounding the thing I said. I suppose it's at least partially gener…
Concision is Twitter's only real point of differentiation. If they let people post blog posts, then it becomes identical to any other social blogging service. Why would they want to do that?
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#47Why did this make the front page of HN?
You mean, compared to the other tech-irrelevant stuff that fills most of the frontpage?
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#48Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#49I'm sure the spammers and hashtag abusers will be delighted at this change. More opportunity to stuff a tweet #with #all #sorts #of #extra #hashtags. /s
I think hashtags still count towards the limit.
He's not saying they don't, just that now there will be more characters remaining for extra hashtags that would previously have been used up by the image/links.
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the destination is separate header data that is used in routing and not considered part of the message body Right but how could Twitter have put data into the separate header in an SMS message? They can't do that. Hence the 140 character limit (the 160 hard maximum for them being able to put into a message and then minus 20 characters for commands).
Actually it's possible to put up to 11 alphanumeric characters into the sender field.
Does that help any with this problem? I'm not seeing it.