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I'm not sure what to make of this. I suppose there is nothing inherently ideal about the (arbitrary) 140 character limit on tweets. Why not 180, or 280, etc?
by jsnathan 9y ago
I'm not sure what to make of this.
I suppose there is nothing inherently ideal about the (arbitrary) 140 character limit on tweets. Why not 180, or 280, etc?
Still, my first reaction was, this is .. a bad idea: the 140-character limit is iconic, it's at the core of their value proposition, and Twitter is going to dilute their brand if they abandon it.
I think it's not only that people sometimes feel limited by the 140 characters that matters, it's also all the other times when people don't feel social pressure to write up longer, perhaps more thoughtful messages, that's important here.
- Shank 9y agoRemember that the 140 count was based on SMS (160 total, giving 20 for the handle and a colon). It wasn't a randomly picked number.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sorenjan 9y agoI don't use Twitter myself, but I think the reason behind the limit is that SMS can send 140 bytes in each message. When sending regular text messages a 7-bit alphabet is usually used, for 160 characters in total.
- kristianc 9y agoThe SMS limit was decided when an engineer working for German Telecom decided on the limit after typing up a bunch of sample sentences. Twitter based their limit on the SMS limit (140 + user address).
- avar 9y agoExcluding the username from the 140 character limit was only changed this year: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-character-limit http://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-character-limit
- adrusi 9y agoThat's not what is meant. Twitter was originally an SMS service, which would text you whenever someone you followed posted a tweet. In order for you to be able to tell who had posted each tweet, the message had to contain the poster's username. This is distinct from the username of whoever they were replying to.
- cesarb 9y ago> decided on the limit after typing up a bunch of sample sentences From what I heard, the SMS limit was actually a protocol limitation: it piggybacks on signaling messages, which have a small size limit (this is also why SMS can sometimes work even when everything else doesn't). Quoting from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS): "Messages are sent with the MAP MO- and MT-ForwardSM operations, whose payload length is limited by the constraints of the signaling protocol to precisely 140 bytes (140 bytes * 8 bits / byte = 1120 bits). Short messages can be encoded using a variety of alphabets: the default GSM 7-bit alphabet, the 8-bit data alphabet, and the 16-bit UCS-2 alphabet. Depending on which alphabet the subscriber has configured in the handset, this leads to the maximum individual short message sizes of 160 7-bit characters, 140 8-bit characters, or 70 16-bit characters."
- joelrunyon 9y agoIt also correlates to the # of characters Google allows in it's headlines. It's worth noting that there is something to the # of characters a human can scan & understand without turning it's full focus to it.
- oneeyedpigeon 9y agoCan you explain what you mean by this? If you're talking about the 'title' of each search result, it looks like it's capped at a way lower number of characters than that.
- joelrunyon 9y agoThe total number of characters in an ad is 130(ish). 25 for title 35 for line 1 35 for line 2 35 for display url 130 characters total.
- scbrg 9y agoFor what it's worth, your message required a lot more attention from me than it would have, if you had used the word "number" rather than the strange glyph "#". I guess you were doing this with some sort of meta humour because the story is about twitter, but the point was inversed. Your attempt to abbreviate things to make them more legible, made them less so. The lesson above applies, incidentally, to pretty much everything twitter.
- joelrunyon 9y agoI'm sorry to inconvenience your day.
- scbrg 9y agoWell, apologies. I got the impression that your argument was that you make a messages easier to understand by shortening them. I just gave you a concrete example of when a message got harder to understand because it was shortened. But good job on deliberately missing the point as a discussion strategy. That too, was very twitter of you.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 9y ago> the 140-character limit is iconic, it's at the core of their value proposition It was related to the core of their value proposition when that was “microblogging that can be updated and recieved over SMS”. Now, its just legacy.
- orblivion 9y agoThings fall into place by accident. I'd say there's no telling what would happen. Imagine what this is going to do to president Trump. His short quips had a striking impact. He'll never again need to end a message with the one word sentence "JOBS!"
- jsnathan 9y agoI feel like the core value proposition is something like "public expressions that can be consumed quickly and produced with little forethought". I think it's important that Twitter gives you the excuse to be less precise: there isn't enough space. It's a small thing sure, but if you look at the differences between the popular social platforms, it's all about small differences. If Twitter loses that which distinguishes it from everyone else, that may give them an initial boost when it's a new feature, but then the novelty will wear off and maybe they will have lost what makes them unique. I'd like to compare this to Hollywood. It feels like the kind of alteration a studio might come up with by relentlessly screen-testing a movie using test audiences. It's one way to guarantee a bland, non-specific result, that won't command any lasting mindshare. Clearly moving from 140 characters to 280 characters isn't yet that just-like-everything-else end result, but it somehow feels like a step in that direction to me.
- glenstein 9y agoI agree with you that the 140 is iconic and it's probably not a good idea to abandon it. What's more, I feel like there was a very simple, elegant solution to this all along. It was to allow long-form text as a type of embedded media, treating it the same as video and pictures. That way you don't lose the iconic 140 characters thing, and you don't have any problem to solve by making weird compromises where the user names or media URLs don't count toward the 140, blurring the lines of what 140 means and losing the "creativity loves constraints" factor.
- tajen 9y agoAnd reversely, it's incredibly creative for Trump to attempt to fit the entire USA diplomacy in 140 characters.
- endless1234 9y ago>What's more, I feel like there was a very simple, elegant solution to this all along. It was to allow long-form text as a type of embedded media, treating it the same as video and pictures. Indeed, especially as people have been already doing this by sharing longer posts as pictures of text
- rayalez 9y agoArticles with good titles/descriptions/images are already beautifully embedded as cards. So having a medium(or any other) blog that automatically posts links to twitter is the perfect solution to this, I think.
- refrigerator 9y ago> the 140-character limit is iconic, it's at the core of their value proposition, and Twitter is going to dilute their brand if they abandon it. I had similar thoughts when Snapchat started introducing their (now many) non-ephemeral features, but I was proved wrong at every turn.
- macspoofing 9y ago>it's at the core of their value proposition Is it?
- craftyguy 9y agoMy first thought is that this guy is going to have to buy a lot more paper now: https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/3/28/15102170/donald-trump-tweets-robot-burning-twitter https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/3/28/15102170/donald-trum...