4 ms·
Conversations in 140 Characters or Less are not Exactly Meaningful
- pronoiac 17y agoYou're not awesome because you allow longer comments than Twitter. Trying to define yourself as such is utterly moronic.
- bhousel 17y agoOn the contrary, I would argue that conversations of more than 140 characters are not conversations at all. They're speeches, talks, blog posts, etc. When you converse with someone, you need to stop talking sometimes and listen to what they have to say.
- rimantas 17y agoOn the contrary, I would argue that conversations of more than 140 characters are not conversations at all. They're speeches, talks, blog p You should have stopped there and waited for reply. Listening is important, but maybe it is better to finish your thought when it makes sense, not on some random limit?
- bhousel 17y agoI easily could have made my comment shorter or split into two, were I expecting it to be pushed out to many people via SMS.
- rimantas 17y agoIt does not make conversation any more natural. Not to mention, that I don't remember when did I have a phone unable to accept a long text and send in whatever number of SMSes needed.
- cammil 17y agoFEWER
- gojomo 17y agoNot definitively. There are exceptions. For example, at... http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/less-versus-fewer.aspx http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/less-versus-fewer.aspx ...GrammarGirl notes that "it is customary to use the word less to describe time, money, and distance". A limited character budget is a little like linear distance (display length of a message; "140 characters long") and a little like money (spending your allocated character count). And, the masses have spoken: ["140 characters or less"] -> about 14,300,000 results ["140 characters or fewer"] -> about 448,000 results
- mrshoe 17y agoThe character limit is not the bottleneck. Twitter-like services aren't good at conversation because of the latency. Everyone here has experienced chat/IM. The reason you can have an actual conversation there is that it's rapid-fire. That's why we've focused on reducing the latency for ShopTalk. Even using HTTP and comet, we've been able to give it a real interactive, rapid-fire feel. Chat isn't as sexy as newer trends like microblogging, but it's far more useful.
- grumblecakes 17y agoThis seems to be overlooking the potential for depth in brevity by utilizing links, media, etc.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- Tawheed 17y agoBeyond latency, it's also about the conversation interface, and the engagement model with the participants.
- InclinedPlane 17y agoNewsflash: some forms of information exchange have limitations that prevent them from being useful for every single possible aspect of communication. You don't drive a Vespa across the Atlantic Ocean and you don't use a 747 to go to the grocery store. Having an extended conversation on twitter is as silly as trying to send attachments via phone or publishing a peer reviewed research paper via lyrical poem. Recognize that all forms of communication have their strengths, weaknesses, and limits, and know when you're abusing a particular form of communication and stretching it beyond it's boundaries of usefulness.