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Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit

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Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit

#131

Post by r00fus »

frank_jaeger wrote: post #112
r00fus wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 at…

oblig pointing out of incorrect oblig correction. network effect[0] is absolutely correct. edit: for the downvotes- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

parent made an edit from affect to effect, so I guess my recommendation was taken to heart :)

Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit

#132

Post by visarga »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #31

What I find stupid is that the length of usernames counts in the message. A message to @myfriend can be longer than a message to @myfriendblessednaycursedwithalongername

Can I write a whole book in the URL part? Maybe if I used a different UTF character for space?

Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit

#133

Post by visarga »

Tenhundfeld wrote: post #38
mavrc wrote: post #27

Earlier 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…

I mostly disagree. Sure, I've been frustrated at times when I can't express an idea in 140 characters, but in general, I think the limitation is a benefit. As a creator, it makes me distill my tweet to the purest essence of what I'm trying to say, and as a consumer, it lets me scan through my timeline quickly. Also, there's nothing stopping people from tweeting an idea and including a link to a blog/gist/whatever whe…

> Sure, I've been frustrated at times when I can't express an idea in 140 characters, but in general, I think the limitation is a benefit.

Doesn't that lead to a tendency for low quality content (content that can be consumed in a few seconds, like animated gifs, quotes, etc)? I usually want to read in-depth articles and editorials, or thoughtful comment threads.

Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit

#134

Post by mgiannopoulos »

danso wrote: post #122
mgiannopoulos wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Facebook has an edit feature for a long time now with a revision history of posts/comments. No issues of abuse. This isn't rocket science.

Facebook posts aren't as public-facing by default. AFAIK there's no FB equivalent to the retweet, in that the content of a FB share is not quite the same as the relation between a retweet and the original tweet.

You can do a share with zero added text = retweet You can also do a share of a link post keeping "the original post"

Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit

#135

Post by cynix »

dragontamer wrote: post #101
kstrauser wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's still ripe for abuse. Case 1: I write "I love cats!" You RT it. I edit it to "I am Al Queda." The FBI visits you. Case 2: I write "I am Al Queda." I edit it to "I love cats!" before you see it. You like cats, too, so you RT it. The FBI has a slow feed, so they see that you endorsed my Al Queda membership. They pay you a visit. --- From a systems point of view, when your whole stack is designed around imm…

The original example is gamefaqs introduction of edits. What is your shoe size? 11 Then the question changes to an age related question. What is the ideal age of a prostitute?

Fun fact: this particular example won't work in Japan, where typical shoe sizes are around 25–29.

Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit

#136

Post by maus42 »

gregmac wrote: post #100
chris_wot wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst Twitter has someone tweet the occasional gem, it's genuinely few and far between. I honestly feel that the format was great when it was only really programmers who used it (and even then I'm not so sure...) but limiting people to 140 characters, even discounting images and links, means most people can't convey views on most complex issues. I have an unpopular view, but I'm firmly of the belief that all Twitter…

Definitely twitter is entirely about who you follow. I tried it out early on, saw no value, and ignored it for a year or two, until a friend convinced me it has some value, and there are two uses I find. I follow several programmers (some internet famous, some merely who I've found from using a project they worked on or someone else's retweet), and through that, find it interesting to get a glimpse at what other peop…

I treat it a bit like a RSS feed aggregator.

Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit

#137

Post by xufi »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #31

What I find stupid is that the length of usernames counts in the message. A message to @myfriend can be longer than a message to @myfriendblessednaycursedwithalongername

That coupled with the number of time they allow you to change it is quite silly too.

Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit

#138

Post by mgiannopoulos »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #99
mgiannopoulos wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Facebook has an edit feature for a long time now with a revision history of posts/comments. No issues of abuse. This isn't rocket science.

Facebook has had abuse from pages that got likes, and then later changed their title and purpose.

You can do this on any social media though.

Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit

#139

Post by krinchan »

There's a lot of weird misunderstandings about how Twitter worked in the early days. I.E. "SMS encoded in 7-bit is 140 bytes." Something about native photo urls. A lot of this, I think, is because people lack context of what the social media and technological landscape looked like in 2006.

Twitter basically started on SMS, back in the day. There wasn't really an app because there weren't major smartphone platforms outside of PalmOS and Blackberry. A lot of my friends made SMS posts to Facebook or LiveJournal, but you never got comments or responses back, so it was very one-way.

That's where Twitter really hooked you back then. You signed up, registered your phone number, and tweets got sent as SMS messages to your phone. The 140 limit provided 18 characters for a username, colon, space, and the tweet. There were commands for following, blocking, etc. and later, direct messaging.

So you got tweets back from people you followed when you sent out a tweet. It really, truly was, as other folks have said in here, mass SMS.

You'd meet someone at a bar, and just send follow NewFunPerson to the Twitter short code and bam, their tweets were texted to you.

All the other stuff that people like about microblogging was just a side effect. Twitter was written to get to people's phones back when the only universal for mobile platforms (in the United States at least) were that you could send a text message. That immediacy, the ability to blast out something quick and get the replies back on your phone was everything.

Also, at a time when Facebook was still struggling with the fact that "Friends" were a two-way street (Following and Pages weren't a thing yet), the one-way nature of the follow relationship allowed you a lot of access to celebrities with minimal effort on the part of the celebrity. You just found Britney Spears, hit follow, and done. She (rather, her publicist) did exactly nothing to get you there, and now you know there's a new single coming out exclusively at FYE tomorrow. Cha-ching.

Twitter seized upon all the weak points of Facebook, made do with what was available in mobile, and hit gold. After that, when mobile apps hit, Twitter took all those interesting "side effects" of their 140 character limit and built on those instead, pivoting to emphasize microblogging, hashtags, and immediacy, since SMS wasn't there. And, to be honest, these things are very, VERY likely something that you get because of 140 characters.

So yeah, Social Media History 101.

Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit

#140

Post by mrmondo »

A lot of people are quick to jump on the criticise Twitter bandwagon here - but I think A) this is a good compromise between giving people what they want and a bit more freedom without losing the core aspect of the service and B) there are plenty of people that like Twitter the way it is and now no longer use sites like Facebook because Twitter is good at what it's good at - sharing small pieces of information, globally, without intruding on your life.
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