4 ms·
Gee, how about we stop acting like we need to limit things to 140 characters? This isn't SMS you know. We do have the bandwidth to actually exchange useful info
by bcl 16y ago
Gee, how about we stop acting like we need to limit things to 140 characters? This isn't SMS you know. We do have the bandwidth to actually exchange useful information and real URLs. Twitter, bit.ly, et. al. are all pretty damn silly.
Even back in the days of 300bd modems and BBS's we weren't this dumb.
- nollidge 16y agoThe brevity is what makes Twitter distinct from everything else.
- carussell 16y agoFunny, I thought the reason people should use a service is its worth, not auxiliary novelties. If I make a pitch to somebody, do you think I should rest assured that they'll go for it if I word it in the following way, "Now I know that by almost all metrics this kind of behavior is bad, but we did some looking into what other people are doing, and it's unique."?
- nollidge 16y agoYou seem quite confident that the 140-character limit is an auxiliary novelty, whereas I think it's rather central to Twitter's success. There are any number of other similar services (LiveJournal, Wordpress, Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr) that do not enforce any such limit, yet everybody's all over Twitter. And which metrics show that limiting updates to 140 characters is bad behavior? URL shortening sucks, for sure, but that doesn't mean the limit on prose isn't useful or attractive to users.
- carussell 16y agoI know that the gimmick is the cause of Twitter's success as well; I wasn't saying otherwise. But that doesn't make it a gimmick. URL shortening is bad for humans and bad for machines. Ergo, that behavior is bad.
- vsync 16y agoTwitter is still fully usable via SMS and that's both useful and unique.
- carussell 16y agoAre there any handsets in use out there that support SMS and don't support Concatenated SMS? This is a serious question.
- BrandonM 16y agoThis isn't SMS you know. But isn't it? I have several friends who get their Twitter updates via SMS.