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Giving you more characters

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Re: Giving you more characters

#33

Post by ppod » 

  In an effort to get people to look 
  into each other’s eyes more, 
  and also to appease the mutes, 
  the government has decided 
  to allot each person exactly one hundred   
  and sixty-seven words, per day. 
  
  When the phone rings, I put it to my ear   
  without saying hello. In the restaurant   
  I point at chicken noodle soup. 
  I am adjusting well to the new way. 

  Late at night, I call my long distance lover,   
  proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.   
  I saved the rest for you. 

  When she doesn’t respond, 
  I know she’s used up all her words,   
  so I slowly whisper I love you 
  thirty-two and a third times. 
  After that, we just sit on the line   
  and listen to each other breathe.
  
  The Quiet World by Jeffrey McDaniel

Re: Giving you more characters

#34

Post by notatoad »

dorfsmay wrote: post #25
fairpx wrote: post #23

> Trying to cram your thoughts into a Tweet – we’ve all been there, and it’s a pain. When I read this, I thought I was on somebody's blog who wanted to give her idea on why they didn't like Twitter. Then I realised this was... Twitter's blog. The constraint of 140 characters is what made Twitter, IMHO, interesting. Sure it required you to do a bit of puzzling, but that's exactly what made each tweet read worthy. Then…

But then people tweet pics of text!

I really wish twitter had stuck to their guns on their previous solution to this: a built-in tool to post longer text blocks as embeds inside tweets, just like people post images of text right now, but essentially "text of text" instead of images of text.

But everybody lost their shit when twitter proposed that, so now we get 280char tweets instead.

Re: Giving you more characters

#35

Post by Shank »

jsnathan wrote: post #30

I'm not sure what to make of this. I suppose there is nothing inherently ideal about the (arbitrary) 140 character limit on tweets. Why not 180, or 280, etc? Still, my first reaction was, this is .. a bad idea: the 140-character limit is iconic, it's at the core of their value proposition, and Twitter is going to dilute their brand if they abandon it. I think it's not only that people sometimes feel limited by the 14…

Remember that the 140 count was based on SMS (160 total, giving 20 for the handle and a colon). It wasn't a randomly picked number.

Re: Giving you more characters

#38

Post by dragonwriter »

fairpx wrote: post #23

> Trying to cram your thoughts into a Tweet – we’ve all been there, and it’s a pain. When I read this, I thought I was on somebody's blog who wanted to give her idea on why they didn't like Twitter. Then I realised this was... Twitter's blog. The constraint of 140 characters is what made Twitter, IMHO, interesting. Sure it required you to do a bit of puzzling, but that's exactly what made each tweet read worthy. Then…

> Sure it required you to do a bit of puzzling, but that's exactly what made each tweet read worthy.

I think most people view “have to do a bit of puzzling” as opposed to, rather than supporting, being “read worthy”. Terse stops being valuable when it goes beyond concise (as brief as possible while still clearly conveying intended meaning.)

The 140 character limit was an artifact of Twitter being designed to be usable over SMS in an era of ubiquitous SMS-equipped phones before smartphones were themselves ubiquitous.

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