DISQUS

Julien · 6 months ago

I don't agree with your comparison... I think that adding more characters doesn't mean more features for Twitter. I almost think that you can say anything in less than 140 characters, and that gives you the discipline to remove everything that is uneeded from your talk. Twitter is about communication... and communication ought to be shorter and shorter to consume (phone vs letter, ... etc). Twitter is not about "teaching" or "analyzing"... that is what you do with blog post, and there is no need for this to be shorter and shorter!

PS: I sent an email a few days ago to the @ on the rght... did you get it? It was about http://superfeedr.com

brandingme · 6 months ago

I also disagree. In college, one of the best professors from the education department spent one class making us summarize a long statement. We'd chop and chop, get it smaller and smaller, and he still told us, "Too long!" Eventually, we came to see how much can be communicated in one or two sentences. Like Hemingway's short story: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

dave · 6 months ago

368 characters.

brandingme · 6 months ago

I disagree. A professor once taught me (via Hemingway) the power a single sentence can contain : "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

132 :-)

Julien · 6 months ago

You proved the point yourself Dave, your 14 characters said a lot ;)

dave · 6 months ago

Proved what point? Please be specific.

Julien · 6 months ago

You can say a lot in 140 characters... no need to add more! Again, n-n communication is both ways and needs to be short! Your blog post is 1-n, there is no need to be short...

Now imagine if every of the readers of this blog post posted a comment that is the same size, you would probably have a tremendous hard time to read all that and reply again... 140 characters allows this discussion. More would maybe be harmful.

chromepoet · 6 months ago

140; part of a system; tweak 140 & the system changes, other features disappear, presentation bloats; does tweak value outweigh loss? (139)

dave · 6 months ago

Please explain and cut the cuteness. We're adults here. You say
features disappear -- which ones? See that's the problem with Twitter,
almost everything you read is nonsense like this.

Chromepoet · 6 months ago

Many people use SMS to receive and send mobile twitters. Twitter adds a few characters but SMS has a fixed 160 character limit and can handle what Twitter sends. If the character limit is increased beyond 140, the SMS would be broken into parts. Many phones do not manage SMS segments well and the SMS feature of Twitter would become somewhat useless for some people. That feature would lose value. I am asking, does the value of more characters offset that loss? I also wonder what other aspects of Twitter might suffer if the 140 character limit goes away. I suspect a high value elements of Twitter to some users, at least this user, is that the 140 character limit makes scanning many twitters easy. We can scan twitters much like we scan log files. When something jumps out, we read more closely. If the twitter has a link, we link out to get more information. You and I look at Twitter differently. You seem to see it as a smaller, faster blog of sorts. I see it as a collection of asides and pointers to further information. Maybe an alternative would be a (more) button after 140 characters but that would still mess up the SMS feed.

sameasiteverwas · 6 months ago

"Omit needless words."

William Strunk. 20 characters.

dave · 6 months ago

645 characters.

Herve Kabla · 6 months ago

Funny. But I remember PC had 64K overlays, at least during the early years, when using Philippe Kahn's turbo Pascal. So maybe the 'twitter happy end' will allow 256 chars, before extending that limitation to 1024?...

achernow · 6 months ago

I never really did more than simple programming on the //e, however, I do remember having to sit and wait for the next screen in Number Munchers, or Oregon Trail or something.

I would welcome more characters on twitter. I know it was designed to work with SMS, however, SMS on all my phones has always been 160 characters, not 140, and really, who uses SMS to manage their twitter these days? I have Tweetie on the iMac & TweetDeck on the iPhone (before that UberTwitter on the BlackBerry). When I had a "dumb" phone, I occasionally did text in a tweet, but never had it setup for SMS follows.

Anyway... All having 140 characters does is require us to unlearn how to speak in proper English. Not that I've probably ever spoken in proper English...well, outside of the grade school classroom anyway.

dave · 6 months ago

Actually it means more than that. That limit means most of the ideas
worth expressing are left unexpressed. I see it in my own behavior. I
used to compose blog posts in the shower or on walks. Now I've
stopped.

And if you think people click on links in Twitter, think again. They
RT links long before they could possibly have read the thing they're
RT'ing. It's completely bogus.

It's like that cartoon on Current.TV, no one is listening, everyone is
broadcasting. Nothing is being heard or said.

Yet people think it's great! Hah. As I said here, it only hints at
greatness. We aren't there. The 140-char limit is part of it.

achernow · 6 months ago

Oh yeah.. There's stuff that I'm starting to put onto FriendFeed over Twitter b/c of the more lax character limit over there. And some stuff goes unsaid, too.

I've not seen the cartoon on Current. I don't have cable here. I refuse to deal with Charter. Horrible company they are.

-Adam

Victor Klimov · 6 months ago

Kudos for the happy endings!
<exaltation bordering on hysterics>Long live positive thinking!</exaltaion bordering on hysterics>

:-)

dave · 6 months ago

Thanks. I thought that was one of the best lines I've ever written. I
wonder if anyone else chuckled at it as much as I did. :-)

Timothy Post · 6 months ago

In Russia we are not limited to 140 characters per text message. Rather, you are charged for 2 texts messages but it is delivered as one. My point is that I do not believe there is any inherent reason why a text should be limited to 140.

cjsparno · 6 months ago

Dave, I think I have mentioned this to you before, but I believe Twitter is better as a broadcaster/announcer than as the medium of communication. For example, I was drawn to this article, which I enjoyed very much, for two reasons:

First, it was written by you, I subscribe to you in twitter and FF and your blog, and I value what you say so its on my radar;

Second, its presence was announced on Twitter, so even if I did not follow you directly, probably someone else I value would have re-tweeted, bringing its presence to my attention.

I have seen a lot of the fragmented content you describe, or multiple tweets that try to get an important point across, but that was not and I think never was the intent of Twitter. 140 characters is plenty to announce the presence of content with a link to it. For me, that is the value of Twitter (and to a greater extent, the value of FriendFeed).

Thanks for your many contributions, its nice to be encouraged to think when reading content. -Chris

dave · 6 months ago

Thanks for the kind words. I really appreciate it.

The problem is most people aren't willing to click. I can see this in
how they retweet before they could possibly have read the post (or
even had the page refresh).

And I measure the click-through rates on this page.

http://dave.40twits.com/

I'm looking for something more sophisticated but still simple and
easy. We'll figure it out.

Dave

cjsparno · 6 months ago

"The problem is most people aren't willing to click. I can see this in
how they retweet before they could possibly have read the post (or
even had the page refresh)."

Can't argue with that - I have even done this myself (although usually I read a portion of the article and will eventually go back to it when I have more time to read and absorb). I was motivated by your article and just posted this...

http://www.cjsparno.com/2009/06/23/the-value-of...

Would welcome your comments and dialog. I think this is a really important topic that needs additional exploration and comment. Hoping to see/read more from you on this.
-Chris

npdoty · 6 months ago

[I posted this on my blog, but I'm also posting it here so that it might be part of the discussion.]

I think you're right on, but that really you're identifying problems with blogging, not with microblogging.

If it were just as easy to communicate with a blog post as it is with Twitter, plus you could express longer thoughts with a blog post, then there'd be no reason to complain about Twitter's character counts. Twitter would simply be a joke, an inferior product completely dominated (that is, in all dimensions) by blogging software.

But it isn't just as easy. Part of it, as many have pointed out, is the small messages -- it's easy to write and easy to read because neither takes that much commitment. But I think there are other issues too, advantages of Twitter that we wish we had with blog posts.

* Replying on Twitter is way easier and more effective than replying with a blog post. Trackbacks are confusing, full of spam and much harder to use than a single character in front of a name.

* People are harder to find at arbitrary addresses than they are with a single username after "twitter.com/". (Like @chrismessina and others, I wish this weren't the case, but currently, I believe it is.)

* It's easier to be part of a trend just by typing a # and a word than tagging your blog post and hoping technorati picks it up.

* Republishing content is a trivially easy and widely-accepted practice. (I think this is why single-click re-blogging on tumblr is so popular too and why Google Reader's "share" feature is so compelling.) You can also push content to particular people with @mentions.

* Syndication and reading is handled in the same place as writing -- as soon as you sign up for one, you've signed up for the other. Even though Twitter syndication is inferior to RSS (Twitter is a single unreliable service; there's no tracking of what's read and unread across devices), I suspect more regular people use Twitter to keep track of all their friends than use an RSS aggregator.

I think it's not so much a problem that Twitter has a character limit as it is that blogging platforms don't have all these other advantages. Conversations happen easily and naturally on Twitter, despite the severe limitation of character counts. I'd love to see those same advantages in the blogging platforms we use every day.

Zacqary Adam Green · 6 months ago

I can't count how many times I've tried to compose a tweet which absolutely needs something like 145 characters to make sense, and I can't do it. Not all words can be abbreviated into ridiculous things like "b4" or "gr8". So I just don't say it, and it's upsetting to do that.

mpstearns · 6 months ago

You have a good point about the limits of Twitter. But, the thing that doesn't hold for me about your analogy is that the 48k was a limit imposed by the technology of the day. The 140 character limit is a conscious design decision with pros and cons attached.

I personally love the flow of Twitter. I have not ever enjoyed very much participating in online discussions before, but the Twitter format has worked very well for me, given my schedule, range of interests, and ability (or lack therof) to communicate in-depth. It just works well for me.

Perhaps a larger limit would work even better. I would be interested to try it, but it has been quite workable to use the 140 characters and then push the conversation somewhere else (as in this case) when necessary.

Mark · 6 months ago

goddamn it. i could so write much better haiku if it would only give me more effin' syllables. i mean hell, how am i supposed to say anything with so effin' few? i could have been a great story teller too…but no…effin' haiku wantin' to limit all my shit.

Stanley_Krute · 6 months ago

Never known many other folks who used the UCSD p system on Apple II computers.

I remember the lovely wall chart showing Pascal grammar that Apple distributed.

Wrote some text and print formatting utilities with it, and a book aimed at showing junior high kids how to program in Pascal on the Apple II.

Thanks for triggering some memories.