this basically reads as:
"We didn't grow at all last quarter, but things here at Twitter are A-OKAY (please belive us)! We can still grow, all we need to do is destroy/modify the one thing that made us unique and successful!"
Giving you more characters
71–80 of 493 posts
Re: Giving you more characters
#72In 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-…
I was disappointed to find this poem didn't have exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words.
It's kind of weird that it doesn't. You could so easily change the "sixty-seven" to "twenty-five".
Re: Giving you more characters
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that 140 characters is what makes twitter twitter. But then again I can't understand what 140 characters are usefull for. I have a twitter account since 2007 (or 2008, not sure). I didn't get it back then. I came back more than once, as it got constantly more popular. I never got it. The quality of content tends to be, for my opinion, very poor. It's mostly people misrepesenting and insulting other. 1) Twitte…
> I have a twitter account since 2007 (or 2008, not sure) It’s written on your Twitter profile, FYI.
I'm not a active user and unfortunately don't care enough to go there, log in to check it. If feel like I tried to "get" twitter long before it was mainstream, that's all i wanted to say.
Re: Giving you more characters
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't use Twitter myself, but I think the reason behind the limit is that SMS can send 140 bytes in each message. When sending regular text messages a 7-bit alphabet is usually used, for 160 characters in total.
The SMS limit was decided when an engineer working for German Telecom decided on the limit after typing up a bunch of sample sentences. Twitter based their limit on the SMS limit (140 + user address).
Re: Giving you more characters
#75Great, now I have to recount to see if my joke about Game of Thrones breaking the Twitter rule still works.
Re: Giving you more characters
#76Re: Giving you more characters
#77And in a few more years they'll increase the limit to 560 characters, and so on. Users will just continue to bypass any limit by tweeting images containing large blocks of text which is worse for everyone than just removing length limits.
> And in a few more years they'll increase the limit to 560 characters, and so on. Users will just continue to bypass any limit by tweeting images containing large blocks of text
The blog post explains how that’s not true with their Japanese example:
> Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people Tweeting in English, but it is not for those Tweeting in Japanese.
If Japanese people feel they have enough space to write their thoughts, why wouldn’t the English ones with a bit more space?
Re: Giving you more characters
#78Twitter seems to have the worst luck/timing when it comes to 'new features'. Last time it was
Users: Please help get rid of these nazis
Twitter: ROUND PROFILE PICS!
Users: Please help prevent nuclear war
Twitter: HOW ABOUT LONGER TWEETS!Re: Giving you more characters
#79Lots of cynicism around here. For me, the 140 character limit really was very frustrating. I tweet rarely, but when I do I often spend 2-3 minutes trying to fit the message into the character limit. Often I just abandon it completely because there's no way to make it fit without having to send multiple messages. This change seems completely reasonable to me, if not a bit delayed.
I don't know...the 140 character limit forced you to be creative in how you condensed your thoughts, but it also provided an easy-to-consume stream of content for readers. My fear is that by doubling the limit, that stream is going to take more effort to consume and lose its differentiation from Facebook.
Re: Giving you more characters
#80The analysis was really interesting. I wonder if there's cultural bias as well - i.e. English speakers tend to be more verbose because we have a need to speak more
Hah, in Japanese and Chinese a lot of words are single characters. To use your post as an example, "analysis", "really", and "interesting" will probably be one character each, they're several UTF-8 bytes, but Twitter counts those still as single characters...
In Japanese those three words could be translated as 分析、本当に、面白い respectively, 8 characters in total - i.e. the same length as just "analysis" in English.