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"I dislike being limited to only 140 characters when trying to convey my thoughts and ideas, so I've never really been a fan of Twitter." <-135 characters (+con
by fyrabanks 13y ago
"I dislike being limited to only 140 characters when trying to convey my thoughts and ideas, so I've never really been a fan of Twitter." <-135 characters (+conveys the same info)
- smacktoward 13y agoHaving to rewrite yourself constantly in order to fit your thought into a (let's face it, fairly arbitrary) limit is not fun.
- stephengillie 13y agoIt promotes consice yet well-thought out statements.
- coldtea 13y agoReally? Have you even been near twitter? It promotes slogan like ideas, contrained thinking, ADD, silly one-liners, and BS self-absorbed tibbits.
- qu4z-2 13y agoConcise implies both short and information-rich. In my experience with twitter, the former is certainly true but...
- saalweachter 13y agoLet's be honest: it gives authors permission to not write a lot. The thing that differentiates Twitter from its competitors isn't the well-thought-out-ness of the tweets, it's the volume. When you can't write more than 140 characters, you feel OK tweeting almost anything. And you do, and you do it a lot. A blogging platform is a drag because it feels like work to write a meaningful blog post. You start a dozen blog posts that you never publish because they don't feel finished. So you end up never blogging because you "don't have time for it". Twitter won because their 140 character limit encouraged constant, thoughtless posting, which allowed for an insane volume of tweets. And it turned out that volume is way, way more important for a social network than quality or thoughtfulness.
- MartinMcGirk 13y agoMost insightful comment I've read all day. I had never thought of it like that before, but it rings true and now Twitter's success makes perfect sense to me (at last). I'm now wondering how (if) you could tread the line between volume and quality such that you could create lots of content that avoided the "Had ketchup on toast for breakfast - #YOLO" kind of content.
- prostoalex 13y agoIn languages where verbs and adjectives are not superfluously extraneous.
- loteck 13y agoGetting to the point skillfully has always been difficult, but your readers reward you for doing it. You're not writing to communicate with yourself, after all.
- goatforce5 13y agoThe 140 character limit was so that a tweet could fit in to an SMS message (160 characters) and have enough room left over to address it to @someone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#Format http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#Format
- mkehrt 13y agoNot true. GSM texts are encoded in a 7-bit scheme, and twitter started using 8 bit encodings. 7 * 160 = 8 * 140.
- jrabone 13y agoIndeed; and the bit-packing code to convert 8 7-bit characters to 7 octets is a PITA (I wrote a Java SMS server)
- marcosdumay 13y agoAnd the SMS messages are limited by the size of the blocks of the first digital celular networks, that got that size because it was enough to fit a "phone #1111-1111, ring" message. So, in no anybody tought abut what kind of textual content would fit that size. Or, in other words, it's arbitrary.
- dsuth 13y agoAnd what do we have now? Most people use iMessages or similar, which have arbitrary lengths, and allow much more descriptive and sensible messages. But not on twitter, where it's seen as some kind of hipster badge to be able to reword a thought into a 140 character haiku. It's a bit silly.
- binarybits 13y agoBut it's good for readers. And if you have a lot of followers your tweet will get read a lot more times than it's written.
- smacktoward 13y agoThis has always struck me as a weak justification. If readers value succinctness, the problem should solve itself without any need for restriction, because people would follow those who get to the point and unfollow those who don't. If somebody chooses to be a windbag and someone else chooses to follow them, why should Twitter be standing in the middle telling them both that they're Doing It Wrong?
- qu4z-2 13y agoFor what it's worth, I don't find it good for readers. People tend to leave out context and nuance.
- mkr-hn 13y agoYou don't have to rewrite once you've used Twitter enough.
- PavlovsCat 13y agoYeah, and if you live in a submarine long enough your eyes unlearn to focus on things that are far away.. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispenses with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum. Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences, even when not containing newly created words, would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of our own day. -- George Orwell, "The Principles of Newspeak" Yet he also wrote this, in "Politics and the English Language": The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics'. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. Of course brevity is generally good, and bloat is generally bad. But you can be concise even in 5000 words if the subject is complex, and waste space even in 140 characters. But one thing is sure, a hard limit of 140 makes discussion of anything remotely complex impossible. That's throwing out the baby with the bathwater... the mere possibility of bloat hurts communication less than the impossibility to elaborate, at all, ever. (posting links, or twee+ etc, don't really count IMHO)
- mkr-hn 13y agoIt's not a either/or situation. You can be brief on Twitter for the things being brief on Twitter is good for without avoiding longer writing.
- 13y ago
- prawn 13y agoI actually really enjoy the challenge and artistry of it. Surely I'm not alone?
- extra88 13y ago"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." - Mark Twain
- levosmetalo 13y agoWasn't that Blaize Pascal?