WHY IS THIS NEWS???!
Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
81–90 of 196 posts
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#82The 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.
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?
"Public SMS" is a more apt description.
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#83I predict Twitter's character limit will either double every two years or it's user base will.
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#84The 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.
that's correct. don't know about today, but SMS users were still fairly substantial in 2011 when Twitter introduced native photo uploads. they wanted to be able to include the photo URL in the SMS.
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#85Twitter popularized those URL shortening services. It is now kinda like Chinese foot binding tradition(making feet shorter to conform to social expectations) - was popular for some time, but then it went away. The same could happen to URL shortening companies out there.
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes. Totally fair point.
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#87Earlier 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.
oblig: s/affect/effect/
Still I think the 140 character limit was in part due to their continued success; I know when I look at a tweet, I'm not going to get a 1000-word dissertatino on a subject - I will get bite-size pieces of info (for the most part, except for the multi-part diatribes or conversations, which I generally ignore).
Link anxiety is a real thing - I'm less likely to click if it's going to absorb my attention for 5m+.
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#88Real 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…
This is a long standing problem with Twitter.
For me, the best way to deal with it has been "Lists" (note: they're hard to figure out and use, and the interface and location of lists is different on every platform).
Twitter has long known that feed management is a major issue for users (especially new users). Unfortunately, they seem unhurried to do something about it.
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#89Earlier 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…
Finding the core of an idea always takes more time than writing a wall of text. But in a world where a message is read much more often than it's written it makes no sense to offload this cost onto the reader.
We are finally truly in the age of the soundbite. Lucky us?
Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
#90The beauty of twitter is to tweet with concise messages. I'd be disappointed if this 140 characters restriction got removed.
that beauty has turned tweets into incomprehensible multitweets and images of text. what i don't understand is why they haven't built long-form notes that can be inserted into a tweet, just like images can be inserted.
Now that is a good idea!