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Agreed, but also storage requirements I would imagine. Those extra 140 characters add up quick in an environment like Twitter. It's estimated at 500 million tw

Agreed, but also storage requirements I would imagine. Those extra 140 characters add up quick in an environment like Twitter. It's estimated at 500 million tweets a day. So UTF-8 characters take 1 byte. That's an extra 140 bytes needed per tweet (at the minimum, I'm not positive on how it's stored in the back end if they do ngrams or whatever else to a tweet). So that's 70,000,000,000 bytes. That's... 70GB, right? 70gb per day, that's an extra 24.920 TB of space needed per year. Not a large amount. Hell, I have a surveillance server with more storage than that. But then running analytics against that extra data, ALL THE DAMN TIME. Plus, if going 280 does, in theory, increase usage, then that number would be higher. I'm assuming UTF-8. I think I'm wrong. Might be 16, which then increases it to...6 bytes a character? I should really open a google tab, but I'm too lazy. I already grabbed a calculator. My exercise for the day is met :P An extra 140 character SEEMS small, but on Twitter scale, that's not a light matter. Shit like that can run away on you fast. edit: Jesus Christ, yes, I didn't include every single bloody thing. This is just a simple 5 minute example how Twitter scale can have a huge impact on "small" decisions. There's outliers in the average statistics. Not everyone will use the full character limit, frequency changes, etc. Nitpickers man...

elorm 9y ago
You forgot to take images and videos into account.
Pywarrior 9y ago
Only a small percentage of tweets actually use 140, I would not assume that because the limit is doubled 100% of new tweets will be 240. Probably less than 5% of tweets will go beyond 140.
Vendan 9y ago
be interesting to see the flip side of "how many multiple tweets will now get condensed into a single or fewer tweets", thus saving metadata overhead
- corodra 9y ago
  That's a good point.
- Angostura 9y ago
  And how many photographs/screengrabs of pieces of text are now posted as plain text.
chronid 9y ago
There is also increased network traffic, more bytes to keep in the caches (RAM?), maybe effectively doubling the amount of data you store (in the worst case) creates terrible effects on (some of) your queries and increase latency somewhere in the system and you have to find where... There could be "big" ramifications, it's a pretty interesting thing to think about :)
tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y ago
UTF-8 characters take 1 to 4 byte, depending on the character.
raimille1 9y ago
Well there will also be a reduction when all these (1/2) double tweets go away. I'm pretty sure the metadata, analytics, events, etc 2 tweets generate is way more than storing those extra bytes per tweet.

elorm 9y ago

You forgot to take images and videos into account.

Pywarrior 9y ago

Only a small percentage of tweets actually use 140, I would not assume that because the limit is doubled 100% of new tweets will be 240. Probably less than 5% of tweets will go beyond 140.

Vendan 9y ago

be interesting to see the flip side of "how many multiple tweets will now get condensed into a single or fewer tweets", thus saving metadata overhead

corodra 9y ago
That's a good point.
Angostura 9y ago
And how many photographs/screengrabs of pieces of text are now posted as plain text.

chronid 9y ago

There is also increased network traffic, more bytes to keep in the caches (RAM?), maybe effectively doubling the amount of data you store (in the worst case) creates terrible effects on (some of) your queries and increase latency somewhere in the system and you have to find where... There could be "big" ramifications, it's a pretty interesting thing to think about :)

tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y ago

UTF-8 characters take 1 to 4 byte, depending on the character.

raimille1 9y ago

Well there will also be a reduction when all these (1/2) double tweets go away. I'm pretty sure the metadata, analytics, events, etc 2 tweets generate is way more than storing those extra bytes per tweet.