DISQUS

mturro · 6 months ago

Expanding the character limit on twitter would fundamentally ruin the service for me. While we're at it we might as well expand the Haiku and the Sonnet too. In some cases that restriction is the very thing that makes the form interesting.

Solo500 · 6 months ago

The brevity of tweets is a feature, not a bug. Linking to a longer post elsewhere gets the job done if you need to develop an idea. What you seem to be looking for, Dave, is something like Tumblr, but with the cool network effect of Twitter. IMO, if tweets were longer, the network would not be as effective since even now scrolling through the feed of people I am following is a timesuck.

David Allen recently compared Twitter to a cocktail party. The metaphor holds up if one thinks of the difference btwn the form of conversation that happens at a party & what happens when the conversation gets serious. Usually the best kind of conversations in that context gets moved to the kitchen or an area slightly outside the main party. (Esp now that the smokers have to go outside--we can speculate on whether there is a correlation btwn the smokers and the talkers...).

In the cocktail party people who pontificate are generally seen as boors. That wd be the effect of an overlong tweet.

paulmwatson · 6 months ago

Don't we have blogs for when 140 characters is not enough?

jobelenus · 6 months ago

Was waiting for this topic. I don't want to read whole blog posts in twitteriffic. That just won't do.

cshotton · 6 months ago

1K

If you can't get the job done in 1024 bytes (be it a very long URL, a small base64 image, or some styled up text), then you probably need to work on those communication skills a bit.

Dan · 6 months ago

Generally I agree that the 140 character limit is very annoying. But easily sending an SMS message to Twitter is one of its primary benefits and of course one of the main things it was developed for.

How technically challenging would it be to accept more than one SMS message if the limit was increased? So if someone sent an SMS that exceeded 160 characters and thus the provider ended up sending more than one message to twitter (or a competing service of course), is that something that can be read in together into one "tweet"? I guess if cell phone providers can do it then there is no reason that an online service could not, huh. I know that Facebook allows more than 160 but that you cannot send more than that via SMS.

Just wondering if there is some technical complication here and if maybe that is the reason they have been so hesitant to expand past 140.

josef · 6 months ago

Dave, interesting that your response to Edman was about 1544 characters removing the cr/lf. I bet there was some technical reasons for the 140 limit. Perhaps an easy 'fix' is to just allow the first 140 to be a default lowest common denominator message but one can send up to 2048 chars. Clients would just get the first 140 with the option to get more. From my limited experience, most people don't need more then 140 chars, but when you do, you do.

The above paragraph is 455 chars. Sure I can make it fit into 140 but why? We don't speak that way to each other in polite company.
--- Josef

angusdavis · 6 months ago

i wonder if some day twitter might charge for a pro acct that allows you to post more than just 140 chars of unicode. just one of the many revenue ideas out there, i am sure.

stuartm · 6 months ago

You seem to be forgetting that the 140 character limit isn't a randomly selected number, it's limited by the number of characters that can be sent or received through SMS. If Twitter increased the number of characters to over 200, then they would effectively double the amount of SMS messages they generated as each Tweet would need to be sent out over two SMS messages.

Nick Bergus · 6 months ago

Text messaging accounts for less than 4 percent of posts to Twitter. How many people are having their messages delivered to their phones via SMS instead of data service and a smart phone app such as TweetDeck? I dunno, but eliminating SMS service , or doubling the number of SMS messages sent to me per tweet, wouldn't change the way I use Twitter.

AndrewBurton · 6 months ago

If your point is everyone's at their desktops anyway, then why, when 140c is not enough space, do people not write in their blog and post a link to that as a reply. Oh, my bad, I know the answer: because that blog isn't Twitter.

Teach_J · 6 months ago

I do that all the time. Write a blog post and then tweet about it. Much easier and you can say as much as you want.

AndrewBurton · 6 months ago

Exactly. This seems like...I'm not sure how else to say it...what people should do if 140c isn't enough. I don't see how 140c is limiting people in any way.

dave · 6 months ago

No, not forgetting it -- how could I? I've had it explained to me
countless times for the last 2.5 years.

andreslucero · 6 months ago

I'm one of those people. I agree that photos, links, and other metadata could be moved out of the main post, but how do you solve the problem of delivering tweets to mobile devices via SMS/MMS without enforcing a character limit?

Angelo R. · 6 months ago

Perhaps just elminating the "re-tweet" and tags from the character count. I find those eat a lot of space. Granted that opens it up to people tagging everything under the sun, but .. one problem at a time.

Teach_J · 6 months ago

Honestly, I like the 140 character limit. It's like writing headlines or ledes. It forces you to write in a concise manner. I only wish Twitter had a tinyurl converter that you could use before hitting enter and without having to visit another web site. I also like the idea of tweets fitting on a cell phone screen. @teach_j

PeterKretzman · 6 months ago

A major benefit of reading tweets is their easy scanning, and that would be damaged by a higher character count. As with haiku, limits force conciseness and creativity. For rare instances, you can always send two tweets in rapid succession. Also, RSS <description> elements are descriptions, not whole thoughts. They tend to assume that detail can be in the item itself.

All that said: I'd be in favor of a) dropping SMS as a technological tether per se; and b) not having RTs or @addressee or tags count towards the actual content limit.

Tom Foremski · 6 months ago

120 is the right number - less is more. More importantly it's more viral.

re2 · 6 months ago

I really like the 140 character limit - it's amazing how much can be said in so few words - and it's particularly important in this age where we're swamped with far too many words saying precious little of any significance. And above all I love the challenge of the 140 character restriction

Nick Johnson · 5 months ago

Twice the average isn't the same as twice as much as what a professional writer requires. Depending on the standard deviation, it could, in fact, be shorter than many of the descriptions you based your figure off.