In the very early days of Gmail (2005-ish) they had a constantly-increasing ticker on the front page showing you how many bytes of storage your account had access to. In my head I'm imagining such a ticker on Twitter's home page as well, but ticking up to show you how many characters your tweets can be. Given their current rate, the ticker would be incrementing at 0.00000037 characters per second. This way we'd have access to 281 characters by next month!
Giving you more characters
111–120 of 493 posts
Re: Giving you more characters
#112This doesn't solve the main pain points with length (megathreads and screenshots for quotes), but harms brevity that made Twitter varied and quick to read.
People post huge "threads", which are a UI mess, and are much much longer than 280 chars. So now instead of "[1/15] Thread…" we'll have "[1/7] Thread…" rants. And people post screenshots of articles which again are longer than 280 chars.
Twitter used to float idea of 10K limit: https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/05/140-to-10k/ A 10K char "attachment" to a tweet would have allowed people to stuff their megathreads and articles there.
Re: Giving you more characters
#113Factoid of the day: the 140-char limit originates from the SS7 MAP signalling protocol used for SMS, which allows a message payload of precisely 140 bytes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS
You can actually cram up to 160 characters into an SMS if you use a 7-bit character set, but Twitter apparently wanted to support European languages and went with the 8-bit version. However, allowing 140 double-byte chars (Chinese etc) blows through the actual limit of 80, requiring concatenated SMS to send.
Re: Giving you more characters
#114This type of announcement needs to come from the CEO, not a product manager.
Product managers execute the vision of the CEO and the company in general. Why do you think they don't deserve to announce something major?
Re: Giving you more characters
#115Luckily the demoscene graphics showcase platform https://www.dwitter.net still enforces the 140 character limit! Keepon making those webgl canvas graphics!
And let's not forget http://tinytocs.org, a CS journal whose article bodies must fit into 140 characters.
Re: Giving you more characters
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the 140-character limit is iconic, it's at the core of their value proposition It was related to the core of their value proposition when that was “microblogging that can be updated and recieved over SMS”. Now, its just legacy.
Things fall into place by accident. I'd say there's no telling what would happen. Imagine what this is going to do to president Trump. His short quips had a striking impact. He'll never again need to end a message with the one word sentence "JOBS!"
Sad!
Re: Giving you more characters
#117Why raise the character limit? If you are going to do that then what purpose does the limit serve anymore?
Re: Giving you more characters
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey man, Jack's been putting in 23 hour days for the last seven years to make this happen. Not cool to mock his effort. But seriously that Tweet shows the usefulness. For them not to have tried it until now shows how scared they are to make any real changes. 1) Guess 2) this 3) doesn't 4) fix 5) this 6) nonsense? Those comments are absolute youtube quality cancer though. Goddamn tragedy that this is the pinnacle of h…
https://twitter.com/badastronomer/status/747503673882746880?...
Yeah, it's a parody, but why after a decade has Twitter not figured out a way to avoid giving the trolliest of trolls such exposure? It seems like 140, 200, 280, or 500 chars is the smallest and least of their problems.
Re: Giving you more characters
#119I guess they didn't consider halving the limit for the other languages instead?
Re: Giving you more characters
#120Factoid of the day: the 140-char limit originates from the SS7 MAP signalling protocol used for SMS, which allows a message payload of precisely 140 bytes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS You can actually cram up to 160 characters into an SMS if you use a 7-bit character set, but Twitter apparently wanted to support European languages and went with the 8-bit version. However, allowing 140 double-byte chars (Chine…
I thought the extra 20 was for the originator's username.