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Coming soon: express even more in 140 characters
- atonse 10y agoAm I misunderstanding this statement? > New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That means you’ll no longer have to use the ”.@” convention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) If you want a reply to be seen by all your followers, you will be able to Retweet it to signal that you intend for it to be viewed more broadly. What if I don't want a reply to be broadcast in everyone's feed? (Not that it's private, but it's just not relevant and usually lacks context). Or are they saying that if you want it shown to everyone, retweet it and it'll show up to everyone?
- johns 10y agoIf you are replying to a tweet, they won't show up for everyone. This only applies when composing a new tweet from scratch that starts with an @name (and behind the scenes does not contain an "in_reply_to", which if you want to broadcast to everyone, can now be retweeted).
- atonse 10y agoAh makes sense, thanks.
- eterm 10y agoHow can it tell? This must use some out-of-band data to figure out whether it's a "new" tweet or a "reply"? Is that compatible with API consumers or the SMS interface? (Or are these both dead?)
- m4tthumphrey 10y agoin_reply_to no?
- digi_owl 10y agoTwitter have been largely ignoring SMS for years... If you reply via an app or their website, they attach the id of the tweet you are replying to in their database. This is how they can show you a conversation timeline. Note btw that their new "retweet with a comment" system breaks said timeline tracking...
- chc 10y agoThe API can easily do this, and AFAIK any Twitter client you're likely to run into already does this. The SMS interface doesn't appear to support this, though.
- recursive 10y agoI had the same confusion. I was missing the fact that there are apparently 3 separate things. 1) "new" tweets - reach all followers 2) replies - not seen by followers 3) retweets - not sure if these are "new" tweets, but they also reach all followers Maybe there are other kinds of tweets also. I couldn't make any sense of this announcement until I realized that replies are not "new" tweets.
- sbierwagen 10y agoVanilla retweets only show up on your followers' timelines if their TL doesn't already contain the tweet. The idea is that you shouldn't see the same tweet twice. (There is a timeout, I don't know how long it is) Quote retweets do what you'd expect, though.
- recursive 10y ago> Quote retweets do what you'd expect I hope you meant the proverbial "you". Personally, I can't find a reason to expect any particular behavior in that case. I've never been able to figure twitter out.
- sjmulder 10y agoI’m happy about this. It keeps the spirit of the short messages while doing away with unnecessary technical limitations.
- FiloSottile 10y ago> New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That means you’ll no longer have to use the ”.@” convention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) If you want a reply to be seen by all your followers, you will be able to Retweet it to signal that you intend for it to be viewed more broadly. This is terrible. They are introducing a way to broadcast mentions without using .@, which is great. So why also making non-reply mentions forcefully broadcasted, with no way to hide them!? I don't want my @ThreeUKSupport tweets to go to all my followers.
- neovive 10y agoThese are great changes for the platform as I always felt the 140 characters was a difficult limitation for replies. Perhaps, it would have been easier to just increase the general limit to 160 characters; avoiding so many work-arounds and different rules. I wonder what impact of 20 more characters would be in terms of hardware and bandwidth at Twitter's scale.
- newjersey 10y agoThe 20 characters is for the handle of the person tweeting. I already have retweets not fit in a single text 1/2: @linuxhiker: RT @CALComputerCLub: Hey @ubuntu we donated 3 @lenovo laptops that we put Ubuntu 16.04 on to 3 students at a local middle school! https://t.co https://t.co 2/2: /MArvqjNtip/s/KtTS Twitter if you're reading, I'm ok with increasing limits on replies (with context) but don't raise the limit on ALL tweets. @511NY: Closure on #BayonneBridge Both directions from New York Side to New Jersey Side https://t.co/Axv6AP1O0A/s/BiVD https://t.co/Axv6AP1O0A/s/BiVD m.twitter.com/511NY
- billmalarky 10y ago>I wonder what impact of 20 more characters would be in terms of hardware and bandwidth at Twitter's scale. I'm sure they're concerned less with the technical impact than the risk of changing the product somewhat drastically. The char limit is a fundamental aspect of twitter. It forces people to create curt, easily digestible content. Expanding that limit might have pretty bad side effects, such as people communicating the same message they would have in 140 chars, but more verbosely (which weakens the product).
- placeybordeaux 10y agoIf you pull from their API you will soon realize the 140 characters are a tiny amount of the amount of data they ship around with each tweet.
- SlashmanX 10y ago> When replying to a Tweet, @names will no longer count toward the 140-character count. This will make having conversations on Twitter easier and more straightforward, no more penny-pinching your words to ensure they reach the whole group. Hopefully this is just for replying to people mentioned in the original tweet, otherwise spam bots could have a field day with this. I'm guessing the people at Twitter already recognised this though.
- zippergz 10y agoAs someone who has been using Twitter since 2006, all of these changes make sense to me, and I'm happy about them. But I can't imagine them being anything but more confusing to any casual user. I don't know what the right answer is, but making people remember more "rules" for what will make a Tweet show in peoples' timelines seems like a mistake.
- gdulli 10y agoSince the new algorithmic timeline you already have no way of knowing what shows up to who and when, it's up to them to decide who sees what based on inflating whatever engagement metric they think is important at a given time. (And who knows whatever other factors.)
- mhaymo 10y agoMy understanding is the rules are now simpler: A reply will not show up to your followers unless they follow the person being replied to, just as before. All other tweets will be shown. I seem to remember some celebrity being mocked because their first tweet was unintentionally not broadcast as it started with '@'. I wouldn't be surprised if many users are initially confused by this feature, so hopefully this change will make things easier.
- pavel_lishin 10y agoThe new "broadcast @tweets to all of your followers" to me reads as "now your twitter feed will become even noisier". On the other hand, their incredibly annoying "here's what you missed" and "non-linear timeline" feature will help limit that, combining the chocolate that I hate with the peanut butter that I can't stand into something approximately edible. I can't say that this is an objectively bad move, but it definitely sounds like it'll erode Twitter's usefulness to me.
- okket 10y agoSo what are the new limits if links, usernames etc. do not count against the 140 character limit? It will hopefully not be possible to create "monster" tweets with thousands of @ notifications and/or hundreds of images...
- deepfriedbits 10y agoLinks will still count towards the character limit for now as Twitter is concerned with abuse/spam. What we may see at some point is Twitter not counting the first link in a tweet against the 140, but counting subsequent links. As for images, here's a limit of four per post, and Twittwr groups multi into a display with one URL. Videos, Vines and polls are capped at one. It's possible to have many, many usernames in a reply, but I don't know if there is an upper bounds.
- johns 10y agoDetails on the changes in the API: https://dev.twitter.com/overview/api/upcoming-changes-to-tweets https://dev.twitter.com/overview/api/upcoming-changes-to-twe...
- ForHackernews 10y agoI thought Twitter banned third party clients a few years ago? They still have an API? For advertisers?
- unlinker 10y agoNo they did not. They rate limited it so much they made third party clients not very useful. Also, most clients are limited to 100000 users, which is a limit some of them hit.
- unlinker 10y ago> New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That means you’ll no longer have to use the ”.@” convention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) Conspiracy theory: they are doing this to fill our timelines with noise so we welcome all the algorithmic changes to the holy and sacred chronological order of our timelines.
- thedrbrian 10y agoThat should stave off bankruptcy
- rco8786 10y agoTwitter has enough cash to run as-is for 400+ years. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2016/01/25/twitter-has-412-years-fix-itself/79301680/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2016/01/25/twitt...
- kfk 10y agoFor the life of me, I could never understand how to use Twitter. It seems it's getting even more difficult.
- phil248 10y agoI think the complexity is part of the appeal. There's some sense of accomplishment or exclusivity from "figuring it out" and being "Twitter-savvy".
- delecti 10y agoThe appeal is that there's nothing to "get". It's entirely understandable to not understand why people use twitter, but how to use twitter is incredibly simple, beyond probably any other social network.
- phil248 10y agoI disagree. After a couple meager attempts I never figured out how to naturally follow conversations, and quickly parsing abbreviation-filled snippets of text is a skill I think needs to be learned.
- hackaflocka 10y agoI suspect that Twitter became popular because it came before Instagram and Snapchat. If it had come after, it would be ignored. I taught an MBA class with 11 students. They were required to use Twitter for a group assignment. My shock when a large majority of them had never used it, and a large minority of the new users just couldn't figure out how to use it, and why it was useful.
- kimi 10y agoI have a four-letter Twitter handle (so I have had it since the dawn of time) but the "why it was useful" part still eludes me.
- MBCook 10y agoOh good, a way to encourage harassment. Before: some @jerk keeps sending annoying tweets to @victim, but since they aren't .@ tweets only the victim sees them in their timeline, or people who follow both @jerk and @victim. Now: @jerk continues to send annoying tweets to @victim, but now everyone who follows @jerk sees the attacks, so if they're like minded they can now pile on @victim too. With everything that keeps going on, including celebrities leaving Twitter due to harassment issues and having to seriously bulk up their harassment rules and enforcement departments... you'd think they'd think about some of this stuff first. But wait, it gets worse: https://twitter.com/chrisremo/status/735115850445783043 https://twitter.com/chrisremo/status/735115850445783043 You can now @mention up to 50 people, but ONLY THE FIRST WILL SHOW. So now you can easily harass huge groups of people and they won't even know why they're getting the tweet in the first place! facepalm
- davb 10y agoI don't see that this change will encourage harassment. @jerk could always have dot prefixed his tweets (as today) and have his followers see the mention. That's not new, it's just one character less they have to type. I'm not saying there's no issue with online harassment (there is), but this doesn't make it any worse.
- st3v3r 10y agoIt's going to make it far easier. While they could dot prefix, they usually didn't. Now they don't have to, and they get bonus visibility.
- MBCook 10y agoPrecisely. Before you had to be purposeful about it by adding the . before the @. Now it's automatic, and possibly unintended. Send a slightly rude tweet to someone you're mad at? Maybe sarcasm that some of your followers don't see as sarcasm? Now your friend may get harassed by your followers.
- 10y ago
- st3v3r 10y agoNobody has been asking for this. People have, however, been asking for ways to curb the tidal wave of harassment that happens.
- tomschlick 10y agoThere is no straight forward way to do that on an open platform.
- st3v3r 10y agoNo, but nothing they've done has indicated that they're even attempting any kind of solution.
- Karunamon 10y agoIf by "people" you mean "vocal minority", and by "harassment" you mean "public replies to public postings". There needs to be a warning of some kind. People seem very unclear on this and don't get that putting something into the tweet box is like shouting it on the street corner. People can and should be expected to shout back.
- jameshart 10y agoThe only people who ask for anything are vocal minorities. And when the public replies are from a swarm of shortlived anonymous accounts, but direct a storm of abuse at an individual's persistent online identity, as well as often any accounts with whom they have interacted... that's not just people shouting back, that's something wholly different and unique to the twitter environment.
- Karunamon 10y agoWhile I have no doubt this happens (if anything happens on the internet, it's breeding a better asshole), I question whether it happens as much as some of the posts in this thread make it sound like. As in, whether it happens enough to restrict the way most people interact with the site. As a counterpoint, most of the onsite crowing I see about "abuse" and "harassment" on Twitter is of the "I said something publicly, responding to me publicly is harassment" variety. And then when I go look at the timelines, I don't see anything particularly awful. Anyone with that mindset should start a blog.
- dnprock 10y ago140 characters limit is confusing. Twitter is making the rule even more confusing by counting some characters but not others.
- vladdanilov 10y agoWhile quietly pulling off the ability to have PNG and GIF profile images against what stated in the documentation [1], leaving only poorly encoded JPEG [2]. And JPEG images are double compressed. [1] https://support.twitter.com/articles/127871 https://support.twitter.com/articles/127871 [2] https://twitter.com/vmdanilov/status/735142731945803780 https://twitter.com/vmdanilov/status/735142731945803780
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mcantelon 10y agoI want versioned tweets so I can edit my tweets.
- alchemical 10y agoFor those concerned about the possible bandwidth issues or scalability issues Twitter might have implementing their 'even more' characters, don't forget we can post upwards of a 2-3MB JPEG and Twitter handles it just fine. I always liked the idea of stuffing data in metadata. For me, most tweets are insubstantial and thinly veiled metadata. There are always those claiming a tweet 'means' something but the context is usually entirely missing, hence the phenomenon of 'subtweets' and worse: the dreaded tweetstorm. I could even encode arbitrary data in a JPEG if I wanted and get back data byte for byte. I just wonder what my followers would make of such tweets and if they are clever enough to fuzz the JPEG for meaning and context.
- DonHopkins 10y agoCould somebody please write up a 140 character summary of this long one-page blog posting?
- archagon 10y ago@people @with @generic @usernames @will @soon @be @getting @a @lot @more @tweets!
- iagooar 10y agoSuch groundbreaking features, I can see their +1k engineers all working hard for months to accomplish the goal and to hit the deadlines.
- sytse 10y agoDid I understand correctly that when I start a tweet with a username it will show up in the feeds of all my followers? That is pretty annoying, sometimes the conversation can be public but you don't want to bother anyone with it. Also, most people do not yet allow people who they don't follow to DM them.
- viraptor 10y agoSounds exactly like that. Yet again Twitter goes: "you know all those things people keep asking for? let's do 4 different things and get rid of something with no workaround available". This is so bad it's getting hilarious. I mean, either the leadership is completely unaware of issues people raise for years, or they are and intentionally neither comment on nor fix them. Either way - WTF? I honestly think they're just delusional about being too big to fail at this point. Another social network will make them the latest MySpace though, just a question of time.
- fehguy 10y agoGoing to 141 chars would solve all their problems imho