
Twitter to keep 140-character limit, CEO says - shayannafisi
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-character-limit-idUSKCN0WK275
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bigdubs
John Gruber had a suggestion where they just make a new attachment type, "Text
Post" that renders like an image card. Slack has a similar feature and it
works well for posting very long form messages.

This would obviate extending the 140 char limit for regular tweets.

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cpeterso
That's a decent compromise design. People already attach images of text to
bypass the 140 char limit. It makes sense to "pave the cow paths" that users
have found useful.

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mcculley
Keeping the limit at 140 or maybe a little longer would be fine, but it
shouldn't consume characters to attach an image or URL. It's annoying that
when one tweets with a URL, every character of the URL is counted, but then
replaced with a shortened t.co link anyway. And because they host images
themselves, they shouldn't count as characters consumed.

~~~
Nav_Panel
This is for backwards compatibility with SMS (text messaging). Only the length
of the t.co link is counted toward your 140 characters. Images are the same --
they are uploaded and a link is generated, so when you send a tweet over SMS
the recipient can view the image.

More generally, if you think about Twitter's design decisions as preserving
SMS compatibility, then a lot of strange choices make more sense.

~~~
idle_zealot
You just taught me that Twitter has sms support. I always thought the
character limit was odd. Is there a particular market they're trying to reach
with that feature, because I've never seen anyone use it.

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alexbilbie
Twitter pre-dates smartphones, mobile apps and push notifications

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forgetsusername
> _Dorsey has changed some of Twitter 's core features since he returned to
> run Twitter permanently in October. Twitter has added "Moments," which
> allows users to easily find tweets about the day's biggest news stories, and
> changed the shape of its "favorite" icon from a star to a heart._

And now Twitter will _keep_ the thing that made it unique. All kinds of
innovation going on over there.

~~~
colmvp
I'm sure a lot of decisions were made by him, specifically business related,
that aren't visible as much as product features, but that sarcastic comment
made me chuckle.

It reminds me of my brilliant designer friends who have done amazing work at
small startups helping create ideas/features/UI for companies them grow from
seeds of ideas into big, successful businesses. When they switched jobs to
some of the bigger companies in SV (FB, Twitter, Dropbox, etc), they always
seem to struggle to mention anything tangible they managed to accomplish
during their tenure (all of them left left for startups).

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DigitalSea
I think they should have done something. The 140 character limit might make
Twitter a unique experience, but 140 is quite low. I think they could have
bumped it to 220 at least or 240.

~~~
chasing
Split the difference: 5,070 character limit.

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medius
I also find 140 characters to be too limiting and hate spending more time than
necessary to twist my words into something that will save a few characters.

I know that this issue is very important for Twitter as a company, but it's
just funny how the existence of a service is so highly dependent on the number
of characters in a textfield.

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karlcoelho1
Why can't his cofounder, Ev Williams, just partner with him and make a Twitter
+ Medium feature. Embedding Medium article excerpts like how quote tweets
would be fantastic. They did it with Periscope..

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tangled_zans
That's interesting. How would that work in practice?

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ocdtrekkie
Sad. It's pretty much the only reason I can't stand Twitter. I'm sick of
finding ways to save one or two characters but still get my message across.

~~~
chasing
I dunno, it actually kind of releases my inner editor. "What can I do to make
this comment extra pithy?"

I dislike that it's essentially impossible to share more complex ideas on
Twitter, but that's different that just having to make a single idea more
concise so it'll come in under the Holy 140.

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dave2000
I stopped using it altogether; got bored of endless self-editing and reading
people explain their misread truncated tweets. 140 is just retarded. Still,
they'll prosper because google, ello (remember that?), app.net (remember
that?) etc aren't up to the task, and facebook doesn't need to take them on.

~~~
vezycash
Actually, Facebook copied the @mention system and the #hash_tagy thing from
tweeter so... there.

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stormbrew
At some point they made it so that in the web UI (you could do this in some
other clients before, but since they started shutting those out it doesn't
really count) if you replied to your own tweet and removed your name you could
connect tweets together. People have been making excellent use of this to link
thoughts together in a way that's readable but still encourages you to pare
down your thoughts into bite size chunks (though some people do abuse it to
write uninterrupted essays, this was no less true before).

All they really need to do is make this feature a little more accessible, imo.

~~~
tangled_zans
I have a love-hate relationship with that feature.

On the one hand, some of the most insightful things that I've seen on Twitter
have been written in such way.

On the other, it's just so effin ugly. You can't reply/share/like the whole
thing at once, so you end up with splintered conversation trees with different
people replying to different parts of the mega-tweet.

I think it's a poor design choice, really.

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stormbrew
Well, I think it's only worth comparing it to how it was before when someone
had a train of thought in tweets. Linking to a single tweet then and telling
people to follow it through meant that they had to go to the user's page, to
the time it was posted, and then possibly go back and turn on tweets&replies,
and then follow it backwards up the page.

I do not think there is any really perfect solution, but sometimes tweets
should be connected to each other and much like many other twitter features
(lists being the other really notable one) this one is only half complete and
wanting of some extra love to make it not suck as much. But, like many of
those features, does fill a real need.

~~~
tangled_zans
I can see what you mean, but as a still-current user I only compare it to my
user experience _at the present_.

Certainly I understand that it used to be much worse, but if it's not
satisfying me now, well, I'm keeping an eye out for what will.

It's interesting you note lists as I agree that there's a really good
underlying idea there that has never blossomed. Any ideas by how they could be
improved?

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stormbrew
Really I think they should be more like google+ circles (I don't like much
about g+, but I do think that particular idea is well suited to twitter). They
should be part of the home page presentation, allowing you to filter your main
view down by list.

Personally, almost all the time I look on twitter I'm looking at a list.
Either the one that's basically "these are the people I want to see all the
tweets of" or topical ones (politics, infosec, etc). I spend very little time
on the 'firehose' main feed.

~~~
tangled_zans
Yeah, I actually like that a lot. I was thinking of something along the same
lines.

Do you think it would be cool if there was a way for people to choose which
lists to post their tweets to? Like, I follow some people who do research on
type theory and I love their insights, but I really don't care what they've
had for lunch, or if they find some cat picture funny. So maybe if there was a
way for them to tag things in such a way that when I filter by "type theory" I
only see their posts related to type theory and nothing else.

I like the idea in general, but my fear that it might be a bit too complicated
for a lot of people? I think it's important to have a really simple and
intuitive user interface, and something like that could just overcomplicate
things.

I don't know, what do you think?

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Xyik
Guessing it was a nightmare to change it in their codebase so they axed it.
Also, increasing the limit would probably add no additional value to their
business.

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macleanjr
I'd argue the opposite. With them recently changing Direct Messages to account
for 10,000 characters, they know what it takes to make the changes.

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dave2000
They know what it means to make the change, but it's entirely different to
change something like direct messages, which go from one person to another,
and the millions of tweets sent every day.

~~~
cpeterso
Do the Twitter APIs support direct messages? I imagine that the ecosystem of
Twitter clients, libraries, site scrapers, and related database schemas have
hardcoded the 140 char limit in many unexpected places. :)

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tangled_zans
This is interesting to me. The 140 character limit definitely _works_ for what
Twitter does, but is it _optimum_? How would you even tell?

I love the long form messages that being in a place like HN allows you to
have.

I also think that there's something unique to Twitter that being on HN does
not provide. I can't quite articulate that yet, though. Would anyone using
Twitter care to try?

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tangled_zans
I wonder how microblogging works in China/Japan?

With Kanji/Hanzi 140 character limit turns into a 140 word limit.

That's like a friggin essay.

~~~
spriggan3
You're making an excellent point about languages. 140 characters in French or
German might not be enough to make a quick point, given how convoluted written
French is supposed to be for instance ( I'm french ). "SMS writing" in french
is almost like the worst offense possible to the language. I wonder what
Balzac would have thought of Twitter.

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tangled_zans
I was just thinking about how it would work for German, which I speak to a
certain extent. I suspect that, per-capita, twitter might be quite unpopular
in Germany compared to other countries. Do a lot of people use it in France?

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gremlinsinc
140 chars is great.. shouldn't change - but urls, images, and hashtags and
@users shouldn't count (hashtags may have a limit of 5-10 per tweet but all of
those should be consider meta-data about the tweet and who it's geared towards
and who it personally addresses. The msg itself should remain 140 chars.

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fluxquanta
140 characters makes twitter unique. It shouldn't be used as a platform for
long form stories. Other platforms already exist for that. I don't want
another facebook. Maybe it takes some editing to make your thought fit, but it
also forces you to cut out the fluff. I like that.

~~~
spriggan3
> 140 characters makes twitter unique. It shouldn't be used as a platform for
> long form stories

But it is (used as such). People try to have lengthy (arguments) discussions
on Twitter. It ends up badly most often because people can't express
themselves properly, the discussion lacks of context then it provokes outrage
then people cry they are being "harassed" publicly. The way Twitter works
cheapens communication. And when communication is reduced to the lowest common
denominator anything can be considered harassement or insult. 140 characters
works with SMS because people who send each other SMS usually are
acquaintances, so there is some context. Publishing SMS out there in the wild
is often a recipe for disaster. Now take any forum like this one. People don't
know each other, however, they have enough space to at least attempt to convey
their thoughts in an accurate way. I admit that the fact that is it a tech
centered, well moderated forum helps to create a proper environment for
discussion too.

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hackaflocka
With the Olympics and Presidential elections this year, this might be do or
die for Twitter.

They're very relevant, but not in the ways they want to be.

People find out what happened on Twitter yesterday via the news the next day.
Not while it's happening (which is how Twitter would like it).

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vezycash
A simple way to change the limit without changing the limit has been shared
here before.

Profile name shouldn't count as part of the 140 character limit.

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tek-cyb-org
I don't know why but the title of this article sounds eerie and reminds me of
something out of 1984.

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nikolay
I will keep boycotting and stick with Facebook Notes. RIP!

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MichaelBurge
This seems like a silly thing to have an article about.

What next, are we going to have the news report when Fiverr changes the width
of their "What are you looking for?" box to 361 pixels instead of 359 pixels
to work around a browser display issue?

Or if Amazon adds a new dropdown menu to their product detail sidebar?

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return0
Given twitter's popularity, it deserves X amount of attention. Now, the
product itself has really few features, so each feature will be
disproportionally analyzed, no matter how simple.

