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Twitter moves away from 140 characters, ditches confusing and restrictive rules

techcrunch.com

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Re: Twitter moves away from 140 characters, ditches confusing and restrictive rules

#11

Post by lutz »

teaneedz wrote: post #2

Removing the ".@" syntax is a mistake. I don't always want to broadcast replies. I still don't understand why URLs are still included within the 140 char limit either. Can someone explain that better than the article?

What they mean is that .@ isn't getting removed -- by default your replies won't be broadcast to everyone (same rules apply as always) -- but since you no longer see the leading @mentions, you physically cannot do .@ on the tweet. The right way to do it going forward will be a retweet on your own tweet.

Re: Twitter moves away from 140 characters, ditches confusing and restrictive rules

#12

Post by Touche »

robmcm wrote: post #8
fayimora wrote: post #5

The way I understand it, the 140 character limit still holds. They just stopped counting things like mentions and URLs.

But if they didn't use a misleading title you wouldn't have clicked the link...

Is it misleading to call a spade a spade? There's a character limit, they're just going to arbitrarily decide what is and isn't a character based on engagement feedback they get from advertisers.

Re: Twitter moves away from 140 characters, ditches confusing and restrictive rules

#13

Post by donretag »

"After all, Twitter is a great big, public conversational platform — the fact that you could follow chats between other users you cared about was part of its draw."

Insane. For me it is the complete opposite. Having to read a personal conversation between two people is perhaps the primary reason I do not use Twitter. Far too much noise. And they should count hashtags as double (the other main reason why I cannot stand Twitter).

Re: Twitter moves away from 140 characters, ditches confusing and restrictive rules

#14

Post by apetresc »

ecesena wrote: post #6
teaneedz wrote: post #2

Removing the ".@" syntax is a mistake. I don't always want to broadcast replies. I still don't understand why URLs are still included within the 140 char limit either. Can someone explain that better than the article?

Urls where fixed to 22, then 23, lately 24 chars. It's the length of the actual shortened url. I've been working with people helping social media for a bit, and one common issue in preparing a list of tweets to schedule is making sure the length is ok. So you end up with silly xls files where you have a url column, a text column, etc. and weird formulas to compute the size. I think Twitter just wants to simplify the…

He was asking why URLs ARE still being counted as part of the length – Twitter seems to have excluded everything except for those. Your reply demonstrates how arbitrary that distinction is :)

Re: Twitter moves away from 140 characters, ditches confusing and restrictive rules

#15

Post by fayimora »

robmcm wrote: post #8
fayimora wrote: post #5

The way I understand it, the 140 character limit still holds. They just stopped counting things like mentions and URLs.

But if they didn't use a misleading title you wouldn't have clicked the link...

haha I thought about that too. Clever but slightly misleading. Surely they could have come up with something true and equally attractive but then again it's the battle of "who gets the story out first"

Re: Twitter moves away from 140 characters, ditches confusing and restrictive rules

#17

Post by sumitgt »

mettamage wrote: post #16

Silly question perhaps (I'm a Twitterer): but can't you now do hacky things like @insert_complete_message_you_want_to_tell?

Maybe not that since that would not be registered username.

http://but.you.might.be.able.to.do.something.like.this

Re: Twitter moves away from 140 characters, ditches confusing and restrictive rules

#19

Post by pilif »

sumitgt wrote: post #17
mettamage wrote: post #16

Silly question perhaps (I'm a Twitterer): but can't you now do hacky things like @insert_complete_message_you_want_to_tell?

Maybe not that since that would not be registered username. http://but.you.might.be.able.to.do.something.like.this

no, because URLs are still counted (probably because of this workaround).
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