
Twitter Plans to Go Beyond Its 140-Character Limit - coloneltcb
http://recode.net/2015/09/29/twitter-plans-to-go-beyond-its-140-character-limit/
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Mithaldu
> removing things like links and user handles from the count, multiple sources
> say

@oh @good @now @i @can @make @almost @arbitrarily @sized @tweets

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nabla9
140 is like two rows of text and it's just perfect if it's only text. Anything
more breaks the haiku-like format.

It's the urls and handles that need more space. Remove one url and 4-5 handles
from the character count and it's perfect.

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pcunite
Personally, I feel like I need 280 characters to express a simple and complete
English-phrased thought. As an example, this comment does not fit within their
limit.

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Nadya
_> I need 280 characters to express a simple and complete English-phrased
thought. For example, this comment doesn't fit in their limit._

The above comment would fit, removes unnecessary words, and gets the same
point across. I feel the limit helps people be more brief, although sometimes
brevity loses a bit of the human emotion or necessary nuance.

The character limit is pointless nowadays, due to people using 1/n, 2/n, 3/n
to chain tweets together. Even Snowden did this today and he just joined
Twitter... [http://i.imgur.com/MaAX7Io.png](http://i.imgur.com/MaAX7Io.png)

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pcunite
>> remove unnecessary words ... get the same point across

true, but I want to "express" something, not just put words into peoples eyes.

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infogulch
But at twitter The People have made a decision with their feet that they'd
rather have neutered brevity than your fully expressed thought.

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GauntletWizard
There's room for a product that is not fully featured, especially one that is
intentionally not fully featured. Constraints are often a good thing for art.
The novel "Gadsby", written without the letter E, is not the finest point of
english literature, but is certainly novel and better for it. Limitations,
speaking eloquently, and conveying your message through simple form has an
appeal. Reducing the number of long screeds and distilling arguments to
concise, short points has appeal.

To quote an old adage: Brevity is the soul of wit.

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mozumder
They also need to separate out links from the tweet, and into a separate piece
of data.

And they really need to allow for editing typos.

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raimille1
This is a typical requirement that blows up on implementation.

How do you deal with retweets?

Example: >I tweet: I love christians @Pontifex

@Pontifex retweets.

Fix "typo": I hate christians @Pontifex

Refresh @Pontifex profile, screenshot ...

Do you notify retweeters that the post was edited and ask for acknowledgement?
Do you nullify the retweet? Do you mark it as edited?

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joe5150
Not a total solution, but e.g. edited posts/comments on Facebook are clearly
marked and have links to a diff.

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aaronbrethorst
About time. If, back in March 2006, the length of an SMS had been, say, 220
characters, a tweet would've been 200 characters long. There is nothing
inherently special about 140.

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Joyfield
GSM SMS had a limit on 140 octets. So I guess that is why.

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Strom
I hope they won't go too far with it. I fear that allowing too long messages
will reduce SNR.

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Torgo
It sounds like they're just incorporating their own "TwitLonger" into it.

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rubyn00bie
Hell yes, takin' it to 141. It'll be like the "11" of our generation... Oh,
wait.

This is just increasing the tokenization (?) of tweets to waste less
characters on tokens.

tldr; 140 characters, just less wasted characters.

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lemiffe
A better title would have been "Twitter plans to take on Medium"

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pcmaffey
When people are posting images of text, you know your product is broken... but
in a good way.

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wahsd
Is it just me or is everything starting to converge?

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hoers
Finally! Now merge with Facebook and all is fine.

