17 ms·
Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit
- stephenitis 10y agoThis is long over due. Can they fix this... When a Tweet starts with a @username, the only users who will see it in their timeline (other than the sender and the recipient) are those who follow both the sender and the recipient. ".@someone Hello I want to respond to you but in public!"
- msbarnett 10y agoThat's not a bug/something that needs fixing? The exponential increase in noise would make twitter even less useful. The last thing my timeline needs is to see all of the crap the people I follow are saying to people I don't care to follow.
- sharkweek 10y agoRight, this is very much a feature not a bug. I have friends who do corporate customer service through Twitter and the feed would be a disaster if every response or "@" to someone was in the main stream of tweets. It still shows up if two people you follow are @ing each other, which is a great way to jump into the conversation if desired.
- stephenitis 10y agoI believe I was more commenting on the behavior of the period and @ ".@" to a average user I think the understanding the intention and the ability to quickly pick up this feature/behavorial cue is a toughie.
- nicky0 10y agoWhat is your suggested fix?
- HappyTypist 10y agoVisual indication on the compose tab with popover that explains the concept.
- andyfleming 10y agoI feel the opposite. I think this system works well. I find it easy to view a conversation with @replies when I want to. The rest of the time I don't want to see misc conversational tweets. There are more elegant ways to respond too, like "That's a great point @andyfleming".
- minikites 10y agoWhen Twitter first started, @replies went to everyone like you propose, and they changed to the current model.
- jdminhbg 10y agoMuch earlier in Twitter's history, there was a setting you could change to either show or hide conversations between people you followed and ones you didn't; they took it away on purpose. Personally I think quoting tweets and responding in there is the best way to reply to something publicly, but regardless, they aren't likely to change the @-reply behavior at this point.
- BinaryIdiot 10y agoI agree because most people use Twitter where they replace a person's name with @personsname so they get a notification of it. Referring to people should work like this in my opinion. Honestly it should notify you even if an @ wasn't included similar to how hashtags essentially don't matter anymore. Edit: seems people disagree with me. You can't create a feature that limits natural parts of speech. It's just simply not a good user experience. For instance let's say I want to talk about how awesome someone is. Or hell I simply want to introduce one person to another. It may be natural for me to say "Person A, I would like you to meet Person B". That's simply not possible with how replies are currently setup so you have to put a character in front or re-word it. Yes re-wording is viable but why should someone change the way they converse only so their intended audience can reach them? That is not a good user experience. What Twitter needs to do is allow you to send a message out to everyone, even if it starts with a user reference, like it used to be. The rub is changing the way conversations work. Conversations are frustrating as hell on Twitter. They need to rework them so that it doesn't rely on an @user but instead thread them. There is a difference between regular messages and a threaded one. A threaded conversation could also make it easier to link to different conversations people have. Right now it's just jumbled into one huge, stupid pile of crap that's not easy to sort through.
- zimpenfish 10y ago> why should someone change the way they converse In a 140 character limited context, they're already doing that.
- scholia 10y ago> Honestly it should notify you even if an @ wasn't included similar to how hashtags essentially don't matter anymore. One problem with that is that dozens of people have identical names. The @name works because it's a unique identifier... though people still sometimes send tweets to the wrong person.
- lucisferre 10y agoI feel like the way they expect this to be done now is by retweeting with a comment added. Though yes there is a case in the middle still supported by the "." technique and it is less than idea. I suppose you can't fix everything.
- intoverflow2 10y ago".@someone" has important dogpiling functionality which is absolutely essential for Twitters most dedicated users.
- bbody 10y agoA very good idea, I just hope it isn't abused with Tweets full of links.
- ldong 10y agoThe beauty of twitter is to tweet with concise messages. I'd be disappointed if this 140 characters restriction got removed.
- user_0001 10y agoif you include an image the limit is 120. As a URL is some redirect service, I believe that drops the limit by 12 per url. The 140 limit is not being removed
- wodenokoto 10y agothat beauty has turned tweets into incomprehensible multitweets and images of text. what i don't understand is why they haven't built long-form notes that can be inserted into a tweet, just like images can be inserted.
- chris_wot 10y agoNow that is a good idea!
- mitchell209 10y agoI expected them to display the first 140 characters or so then have longer content expand upon tapping into the tweet once they started introducing those cards into the tweets.
- djsumdog 10y agoThere were things like Tweet Longer, and TwitPic (before Twitter had images) and lots of other little services that built on top of Twitter. Twitter then started doing a lot of that stuff on its own and tried to kill off the other services (3rd party clients like Falcon Pro, TwitPic, etc.) What was once a beautiful ecosystem to support this interesting 140 character thing got gobbled back up by a company that realized it needed to monetize.
- BinaryIdiot 10y agoRestrictions are not always good even if the ultimate goal is concise messages. It's hard finding anyone's twitter feed nowadays where people are not getting around the character limit by including screenshots of text. It's EVERYWHERE and it's not easily indexed to be searched. They have to increase the limit otherwise people will get tired of using the workarounds (because, let's face it, it's practically impossible to have any kind of meaningful conversation at 140 characters at a time). It won't be to 5,000 but I would be surprised if they don't eventually go up to, say, 500 max.
- robk 10y agoI'm sure the spammers and hashtag abusers will be delighted at this change. More opportunity to stuff a tweet #with #all #sorts #of #extra #hashtags. /s
- 6stringmerc 10y agoCould this be seen as some kind of attempt to hold-off Snapchat/Instagram photo-sharing competition and keep attention in their platform? Personally I don't like the image taking away from the limit, feeling pretty indifferent on the links part. Overall my impression is that this would be a reasonable change, whereas taking a hammer to the 140 limit as a general concept might not be a proper avenue.
- flyt 10y agoI doubt it. The sharing models and overall experience of Snapchat sharing and Twitter are radically different and this doesn't change it in a meaningful way.
- ProAm 10y agoTwiiter is in a fight for its life right now, this is definitely an attempt to retain current users and encourage usage.
- eecks 10y agoWill-this-be-the-new-hashtag.com
- andyfleming 10y agoProbably not since links get converted to t.co links, right?
- StavrosK 10y agoyes-but-they-get-shown-semi-expanded.hashtag
- javajosh 10y agogod-i-hope-not.com it-is-dns-noise.ugh
- facepalm 10y agoMight be preferable to the current practice of simply putting longer texts into images.
- niccaluim 10y agoLong URLs are truncated and ellipsized, e.g.: this-is-a-long-url-with-a-very-very-very-domain-name.com/and-a-sorta-long-path-component-but-still-long-enough-to-trigger-shortening is displayed as …with-a-very-very-very-domain-name.com/and-a-sorta-lo…
- nickfrostatx 10y agoGiven how important domain names are for security, it would be concerning if domain names get truncated. I could craft: evil.net/this-is-a-very-very-long-path/bankofamerica.com/account-settings/blah/blah/blah Which, depending on how this is implemented, might render to ...bankofamerica.com/account-settings/blah/blah/blah
- notahacker 10y agothis horse bolted long ago with ubiquitous shortURL services
- askafriend 10y agoThe fact that it took this long for them to make such an obvious change speaks to how afraid they are (were?) to challenge core assumptions about the product.
- donohoe 10y agoAgree. We've told them this directly for years. Whats next?
- buro9 10y agoEdit!
- iKenshu 10y agoThat should be nice, I need that option.
- madsushi 10y agoBeing able to edit something that someone has already retweeted seems ripe for abuse.
- buro9 10y agoEssentially a tweet ID should be a pointer to "latest version", but with historical versions preserved and available at the same visibility level as the parent (typically public) and a small indicator would show that it has been edited and the history is available. But all of those, "Damn I made a typo or dumb spelling (thx mobile keyboard) and yet it has been replied to or re-tweeted already"... all of that is solved by edit with visible history.
- kstrauser 10y agoI think it's still ripe for abuse. Case 1: I write "I love cats!" You RT it. I edit it to "I am Al Queda." The FBI visits you. Case 2: I write "I am Al Queda." I edit it to "I love cats!" before you see it. You like cats, too, so you RT it. The FBI has a slow feed, so they see that you endorsed my Al Queda membership. They pay you a visit. --- From a systems point of view, when your whole stack is designed around immutability (so you can serve archives of past tweets from append-only CDNs, for example) it may be nigh impossible to add editing.
- Bootvis 10y agoI hope they only zero-count the first link. That allows 140 characters of commentary + the link and limits abuse.
- ComputerGuru 10y agoWhat I find stupid is that the length of usernames counts in the message. A message to @myfriend can be longer than a message to @myfriendblessednaycursedwithalongername
- djsumdog 10y agoIt made sense during the time period it came about. You have 160 characters for an SMS. 140 allows 20 characters for @names, commands, etc. When my friends and I first started using Twitter, we basically used it as a group chat, similar to Hangouts/FB today.
- ComputerGuru 10y agoI don't think it did. Phone numbers are not included in the length of SMS messages - the destination is separate header data that is used in routing and not considered part of the message body. If I sent a message to a special "four digit" phone number or to a full 10-digit number, or even an international text message (not mms) with 40 digits in the address, the message length is not in any way shortened as a result. (Of course once a UDH is needed to deal with message concatenation, etc (which never really work, anyway) the limit is reduced to 153 characters - still longer than twitter's (lame) limit, in all cases.) The whole "we need twenty characters to set aside the destination" was such a hollow rational that never made any sense. IIRC, it was revealed at some point that the 140 character message limit for tweets was basically the result of someone sitting down and doing a brief, informal testing of whatever they thought to be "the average sms message" and that's the number they ended up with.
- chrisseaton 10y ago> the destination is separate header data that is used in routing and not considered part of the message body Right but how could Twitter have put data into the separate header in an SMS message? They can't do that. Hence the 140 character limit (the 160 hard maximum for them being able to put into a message and then minus 20 characters for commands).
- aaronsnoswell 10y agoWhy did this make the front page of HN?
- return0 10y agoYou mean, compared to the other tech-irrelevant stuff that fills most of the frontpage?
- SpanishBrowne 10y agoI'm assuming what you're really asking is; why is this news when their peers are venturing into amazing new fields like self-driving cars, immersive VR and AR, AI, chat bots etc., meanwhile, Twitter continues to agonise over how many characters to allow in a tweet (and subsequently presenting the decision as an amazing product update). Valid question!
- smegel 10y agoWhen all else fails, turn your product into a spamvertising platform.
- oh_sigh 10y agoExpect to see t.co/links-that-look-like-this
- darkstalker 10y agoYou can do that already. Storing arbitrary data in long URL's has been possible since the introduction of URL shorteners (play.rust-lang.org uses this extensively)
- oh_sigh 10y agoYes, but if URLs don't count against your char limit, then it becomes more attractive. Previously there would be no point in trying to hide data in short links, because they still counted against your character count
- Thrymr 10y agoThey should count the words in photos of text posted to get around the limit, though.
- riffic 10y agoGood, they should have done this a long time ago. It always would have been trivial to remove URLs from the data and throw it into metadata, where character limits do not matter. Shame it took 2446 days for this basic idea to come to fruition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=804977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=804977
- ck2 10y agoHow are they technically going to SMS the photos and links within 140 characters then?
- hiram112 10y agoReal question. I avoided Twitter for years, and finally bit the bullet recently. The problem is my feed is out of control. Is there a way to filter it? For example, I want to only match the travel deals by regex (my city), the politics stuff by popularity, etc. I was under the impression that Twitter closed off their API to 3ed parties, so maybe this is no longer possible. On a side note, my current company recently switched to a MicroService framework based on Twitter Finagle / Finatra. At first, I was grumpy (damn Hipsters, another failure a la Node and Mongo), but as I learn more about it and Scala, I'm really impressed!
- hackaflocka 10y agoThis is a long standing problem with Twitter. For me, the best way to deal with it has been "Lists" (note: they're hard to figure out and use, and the interface and location of lists is different on every platform). Twitter has long known that feed management is a major issue for users (especially new users). Unfortunately, they seem unhurried to do something about it.
- leephillips 10y agoCheck out Tweetdeck's search columns. You can still write scripts that use the API. But it's rate-limited.
- simonswords82 10y agoTwitter's onboarding process is a mess. Last time I checked they offer up some "famous" people for you to follow, and then leave you to it to work out how to extract value from the feed. If you can be bothered to spend hours setting up lists and/or carefully curating who you follow you might be able to extract value from your feed. Failing that, a third party app like Tweetdeck might help. IMO all of this is too much hard work.
- mceoin 10y agoWHY IS THIS NEWS???!
- c3534l 10y agoI predict Twitter's character limit will either double every two years or it's user base will.
- realitycheckxxx 10y agoTwitter popularized those URL shortening services. It is now kinda like Chinese foot binding tradition(making feet shorter to conform to social expectations) - was popular for some time, but then it went away. The same could happen to URL shortening companies out there.
- slantaclaus 10y agoRIP twitter
- Animats 10y agoAlso, I think Unicode characters only count as one character. This is now totally disconnected from SMS.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoYes, they count the number of normalised Unicode code points. They don't care how many bytes they take up.
- zoonek 10y agoThis is particularly unfair when you compare what can be said in a tweet in Japanese or Chinese, and what can be said in European languages: with Asian languages, you can easily fit three reasonably complex sentences -- that is much longer than this 274-character paragraph.
- brianbreslin 10y agoI would venture to guess that fewer and fewer of their users are on sms interfaces for Twitter, and more than 90% are on smart phones. Thus the character limit isn't as big of a deal.
- krinchan 10y agoThere's a lot of weird misunderstandings about how Twitter worked in the early days. I.E. "SMS encoded in 7-bit is 140 bytes." Something about native photo urls. A lot of this, I think, is because people lack context of what the social media and technological landscape looked like in 2006. Twitter basically started on SMS, back in the day. There wasn't really an app because there weren't major smartphone platforms outside of PalmOS and Blackberry. A lot of my friends made SMS posts to Facebook or LiveJournal, but you never got comments or responses back, so it was very one-way. That's where Twitter really hooked you back then. You signed up, registered your phone number, and tweets got sent as SMS messages to your phone. The 140 limit provided 18 characters for a username, colon, space, and the tweet. There were commands for following, blocking, etc. and later, direct messaging. So you got tweets back from people you followed when you sent out a tweet. It really, truly was, as other folks have said in here, mass SMS. You'd meet someone at a bar, and just send follow NewFunPerson to the Twitter short code and bam, their tweets were texted to you. All the other stuff that people like about microblogging was just a side effect. Twitter was written to get to people's phones back when the only universal for mobile platforms (in the United States at least) were that you could send a text message. That immediacy, the ability to blast out something quick and get the replies back on your phone was everything. Also, at a time when Facebook was still struggling with the fact that "Friends" were a two-way street (Following and Pages weren't a thing yet), the one-way nature of the follow relationship allowed you a lot of access to celebrities with minimal effort on the part of the celebrity. You just found Britney Spears, hit follow, and done. She (rather, her publicist) did exactly nothing to get you there, and now you know there's a new single coming out exclusively at FYE tomorrow. Cha-ching. Twitter seized upon all the weak points of Facebook, made do with what was available in mobile, and hit gold. After that, when mobile apps hit, Twitter took all those interesting "side effects" of their 140 character limit and built on those instead, pivoting to emphasize microblogging, hashtags, and immediacy, since SMS wasn't there. And, to be honest, these things are very, VERY likely something that you get because of 140 characters. So yeah, Social Media History 101.
- mrmondo 10y agoA lot of people are quick to jump on the criticise Twitter bandwagon here - but I think A) this is a good compromise between giving people what they want and a bit more freedom without losing the core aspect of the service and B) there are plenty of people that like Twitter the way it is and now no longer use sites like Facebook because Twitter is good at what it's good at - sharing small pieces of information, globally, without intruding on your life.
- pmlnr 10y agoThis is how you break backwards compatibility.
- rdancer 10y agoI wonder what they will do once people start using http://the.links http://the.links http://to.write.longer http://to.write.longer http://messages http://messages
- oneeyedpigeon 10y agoAnyone wanting to bypass the 140 limit is already doing so using an image with text in it. And anyone who spams really long messages using URLs is going to see their followers count drop pretty rapidly.
- JetSpiegel 10y agoI like your optimism
- intoverflow2 10y ago> using an image with text in it. yep.... https://twitter.com/jack/status/684496529621557248 https://twitter.com/jack/status/684496529621557248
- Robadob 10y agoHasn't twitter been replacing long URLs with their own short URLs for a while now? So this change probably won't make a difference, assuming users will still have to hover the link to see the tooltip of the full URL.
- richmarr 10y agoThe short answer is that they won't care much. Twitter's job right now is to figure out how to make their UX less niche and grow market share before they lose ground to the Whatsapps and Snapchats of the world, not to police edge cases that are better managed by simple social norms.
- rdancer 10y agoMy point is that this will become the new social norm, much like now it is the norm to write short cryptic messages that readers may or may not understand.
- listentojohan 10y agoNice update - Been missing this for a loooong time.
- JulianMorrison 10y agoThey should just quit with the limit. It was an amusing "brand". But it's become a millstone, blocking thoughtful posts and promoting shoutiness.
- colincarter41 10y agoIt still not confirmed, but they might be testing out this before applying changes completely. But, I must say, this would make marketers more happy to share their voice.
- intoverflow2 10y agoWould be nice if pic.twitter.com links didn't link to videos with sound too that auto-play with sound when in their mobile app
- eng_monkey 10y agoWow, disruptive technology!
- altitudinous 10y agoThis sounds like the number of photos could be unlimited as number of photos is also affected by the 140 char limit. This kept the quality of photos / videos high. So could expect galleries of rubbish / low quality attached to a tweet? But maybe this is discussed. I haven't RTFA.
- chestervonwinch 10y agoStackexchange comments behave the same way, and it has always bugged me. Maybe they will notice this and change the char count behavior in comments as well?