Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree. We've told them this directly for years. Whats next?
Edit!
That's a recipe for disaster. You don't edit SMS, why should you be able to edit tweets?
Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
71–80 of 196 posts
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#72How are they technically going to SMS the photos and links within 140 characters then?
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 doesn't matter that you find it frustrating. It matters that by forcing you to be concise twitter improves the reader experience. Twitter is optimized for readers, not writers.
Twitter is optimized for superficial reading. Some ideas are more complicated than a one-liner.
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
> Concision is Twitter's only real point of differentiation.
Really, the size is an artifact of the early importance of SMS as a mechanism for Twitter. If SMS isn't important to Twitter anymore, I can see why it makes sense to reconsider the limit.
Even if concision is a positive differentiator, there's no reason a limit based on SMS's limitations must be treated as unalterable.
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 doesn't matter that you find it frustrating. It matters that by forcing you to be concise twitter improves the reader experience. Twitter is optimized for readers, not writers.
> Twitter is optimized for readers, not writers.
For a certain kind of reader.
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it did. Phone numbers are not included in the length of SMS messages - the destination is separate header data that is used in routing and not considered part of the message body. If I sent a message to a special "four digit" phone number or to a full 10-digit number, or even an international text message (not mms) with 40 digits in the address, the message length is not in any way shortened as a result…
> 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).
I don't think a lot of people realize that when twitter was new, one of the main use cases was sending an SMS to 40404 to post.
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#77Real question. I avoided Twitter for years, and finally bit the bullet recently.
The problem is my feed is out of control. Is there a way to filter it?
For example, I want to only match the travel deals by regex (my city), the politics stuff by popularity, etc.
I was under the impression that Twitter closed off their API to 3ed parties, so maybe this is no longer possible.
On a side note, my current company recently switched to a MicroService framework based on Twitter Finagle / Finatra. At first, I was grumpy (damn Hipsters, another failure a la Node and Mongo), but as I learn more about it and Scala, I'm really impressed!
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Essentially a tweet ID should be a pointer to "latest version", but with historical versions preserved and available at the same visibility level as the parent (typically public) and a small indicator would show that it has been edited and the history is available. But all of those, "Damn I made a typo or dumb spelling (thx mobile keyboard) and yet it has been replied to or re-tweeted already"... all of that is solve…
Just imagine the gargantuan changes that could be necessary for small tweaks like that. Twitter was built on RoR originally, so it was probably a pretty standard relational model, then they did massive scaling for huge read/write loads, then they did massive scaling for real time features, god knows how hard it would be just to add a foreign key. I really, really, want to take a day and just go through all their engi…
Honestly, if they only designed to scale and did not anticipate iterating on the product, they deserve to fail. My guess is that this not a trivial change but worth the effort.
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 doesn't matter that you find it frustrating. It matters that by forcing you to be concise twitter improves the reader experience. Twitter is optimized for readers, not writers.
> Twitter is optimized for readers,
Twitter is optimized for SMS.
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard to blame them for that, though. They made a blog with a 140-character limit and it became one of the most valuable companies in the world. Who knows what it will become if they fiddle with anything?
It wasn't really a blog though, right? Maybe it began as "a real-time blog aggregator, where blogs only have titles". I believe nowadays it's the network effect that keeps them, not the technology itself.
A description that, I think, would also fit HN ...