Comment by justinmolineaux | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justinmolineaux | Hacker News Reader

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justinmolineaux

Thanks! That's interesting too - lifting the public tweet limit would also fundamentally change Twitter. As an author of tweets, I think I'd like it. I think @byuu mentioned it would promote intelligent discourse on important subjects - I agree.

As a reader though, I don't want to lose the high-bandwidth nature of Twitter. The headline thought/status/caption in your stream, with a link to the details hits an information consumption optimum for me.

It's really that first DM in a conversation where I think 140 characters causes me to leave Twitter. Maybe I'm doing it wrong - often trying to stuff salutation + context + question into the first DM. If the convo gets past that, then yeah, 140 is fine.

I guess I just don't "get" twitter, but despite the character limit, I still feel like a high-res screenful of tweets still contains almost no content. The webpage limits tweets to a very narrow column in the middle of the browser window, and there's a ton of fluff at the top and bottom of every tweet. I've never been successful at curating my twitter feed; I follow way fewer people than I'd like to, and still see way too much junk.

Facebook is getting worse about "junk" too, but somehow I see far more content per pixel on Facebook than I do on Twitter.

I'd like to think limiting content to 140 characters would make twitter more information-dense, but it doesn't feel that way in my anecdote.

You can try to use TilePad (http://tilepad.co). It is a Chrome extension that arranges twitter timeline in columns, allows to configure a tweet design, and much more.

A huge portion of tweets in my stream have a hyperlink anyway, so in some sense the "bandwidth" is much more than 140 characters per tweet. I think they could allow longer tweets without compromising much. Perhaps the compose tweet text box could even indicate what is "above the fold," which would be limited to 140 characters.

I think they should keep the 140 limit for the body message, but exclude URLs and have a separate limit for some additional hash tags.

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