
Should Twitter Extend the 140 Character Limit? - DuqE
http://www.awdp.org/articles/334/Tweeting-for-Business---Should-Twitter-Extend-the-140-Character-Limit?
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JoshTriplett
Twitter without a short character limit would become something else entirely.
"Microblogging" has "micro" in the name for a reason. Without the
140-character limit, it would just become "blogging", and plenty of services
exist for that. Microblogging offers an interesting niche, which tends to get
used for short messages that often include a URL.

Given that eliminating the limit entirely seems like the wrong answer, I also
don't think it makes sense to extend the 140 character limit to something
marginally longer; that just seems like pointless churn that would break the
expectations of various tools that interact with Twitter and other
microblogging services.

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rudiger
The maximum length should be 160 characters, not 140. When SMS was developed,
research was done to show that 160 characters provided enough space to
communicate most short messages [1]. Less characters were shown to be too
tight. Unfortunately, Twitter, built on top of SMS, had to clip 20 characters
for the username.

Of course, that's just for short text messages. Maybe embedding in hyperlinks,
pictures, music, and video doesn't need the same constraints.

[1]
[http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-...](http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-
text-messaging.html)

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Swizec
As Mark Twain once said: "I apologize about the length of this letter, I
didn't have time to write a short one"

Extending the limit would just make people sloppy.

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saintfiends
I think it should have a maximum length for the links in tweet, but not count
them in length of tweet.

*Maximum length for the links so that users don't abuse it.

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ujjvala
There is not even a decent link shortener in twitter.com

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JoshTriplett
What makes t.co non-decent?

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DuqE
I think what he meant, is twitter does not have an embedded link shorterner on
the site but only if content is submitted via external links. Like HootSuite
when submitting to FB or Twitter you can shorten a link while submitting the
content. That would be a very welcomed feature for twitter in the long run.

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JoshTriplett
Ah, I see. Yeah, I agree; I'd like to see t.co better integrated into the
normal web UI, not just the link-sharing interface
(twitter.com/share?url=...).

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1reza
nope

