Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets
recode.net
recode.net
To me, that actually sounds pretty great. One thing that's nice about Twitter is that it's fairly skimmable. All of those "1/ Some thought", "2/ some thought continued" threads damage that. Combining them into a "My thoughts on... read more" tweet would be much nicer.
If they implement the feature like that, which is implied in the article, this would be a big improvement to Twitter in my opinion.
Means that someone can read as usual, or delve for the full series of tweets. They could provide an indication to the writer of what percentage of people read to which depth, for example.
It could work well for presenting news articles (sentence or paragraph at a time), photo galleries/essays, slidedecks, stories, advertising, etc. Using a news article as an example, some people will be interested in just the headline, others in the first three bits, a few in the full story to its end.
- Twitter character limit is already exceeded by people writing somewhere and posting the screenshotted image of the text, which is awful.
- 1/N.. N/N style can be expressed better by extended character limits, but that will decrease the number of tweets, which a public company may see as a deteriorating metric.
Unfortunately Twitter has more usability problems than char limit in the main timeline user interface.
- Viewing a conversation is pretty much confusing. You click on a tweet, it expands and it's not obvious how the conversation with a tree-branching structure proceeds
- "Read later" is needed independent of "Like"
Vivek Wadhwa, on the other hand... his rants were a mess.
I was initially really against this, but parent comment brings a compelling argument: people are already using the service to say more than 140chars worth of stuff. The current methods to do it result in a far worse user experience than the tried and true "Read More" button would.
That said, I'm skeptical of it just in terms of product definition. Like Instagram adding portrait/landscape photos, more than 140 characters to a tweet does nothing but obscure what exactly the product is and how you're supposed to use it (even if people circumvent that anyhow).
UX is something many businesses seem to really struggle with. If unnecessary friction is added, it really should cause stakeholders and designers to pause. The "read more" CTA will lead to more truncated tweets within the first 140 chars, something that is visually unappealing and breaks the reading experience by forcing a manual action. The workarounds you describe are not used by everyone and I'd wager that most users simply keep their posts within the 140 char limit rather than pict-tweet or storm a longer convo. Yes it forces brevity, but that is the Twitter identity which supports the product's skimmability usefulness. Give users a read more option, and many will post a few extra chars just because they don't have to put much thought into their wording now. Short term: usage goes up. Long term: quality decreases as Twitter becomes just another Facebook or Medium. It will be worse than Medium though because the audience Twitter is going after is more generic.
I've always argued that Twitter's userbase is more influential and valuable because of its forced brevity and fact that it was unique.
I already avoid truncated tweets and want to read long-form content elsewhere. So, I won't be using Twitter more. Maybe others will, but again, I'd wager that Twitter is simply sliding down a path that will be ultimately more harmful for its long term sustainability.
I totally disagree. I still find it impossible to follow threads of conversation on Twitter. I'm a software developer and don't consider myself to be an idiot, either.
(Unrelated: I accidentally downvoted you when I was trying to copy-and-paste, and I'm terribly sorry!)
I do think there is a tendency for social media sites to converge towards the same thing. As features are added, and limitations are removed, the lines between different types of sites begins to blur. Something that started as some simple niche site, starts allowing users to host content, create forums, have their own chat app, adds features from discussion sites, etc. Eventually we will end up with some kind of hyper-FaceTubeRedditumblrkype.
This is already what the bulk of tweets are today. What Twitter (and Facebook) want is for people to not have to leave to read external content.
So Twitter wants to be RSS with better discovery. If there were discovery and UX for blogs like there is for podcasts (Pocketcasts, Overcast, etc.), then Twitter wouldn't even have a leg up on RSS at all.
I've often dreamed of a decentralized "Twitter" that allows you to subscribe to any Twitter, Facebook, or blogging feed and makes them all equal, first-class citizens (including the ability to reply/retweet/etc.)
* Not to mention, even if folks knew what RSS was, they don't necessarily want to host their own blog.
The application can obfuscate the underlying technology. You don't need to know what RSS is to use it every day and love it, just as you don't need to know about DNS, TCP/IP, or most other internet technologies to enjoy the web.
I'm still not sure what your point is - you said Twitter is trying to "be" RSS, but that's just the format, not the application. Twitter is not trying to aggregate content from elsewhere, either.
Maybe not directly, but they sure make it easy for third party sites to have "Share this article via Twitter" buttons.
Twitter can track you across third-party sites using its widgets, and it also knows your subscribing/reading behavior.
A decentralized system could be self-hosted and only pull in data through RSS, keeping you as anonymous as the IP address that you use. You'd only give up anonymity by replying to posts.
aka FriendFeed/Google Buzz. Neither of which were at all successful or exist anymore.
The problem is that there is no incentive to use them as platforms. People just output their other primary sources through them, and then engage on their primary platform.
That makes them horrible for users (who write comments and never hear back).
140c is great for one-liners and linkbait, which is - apparently - the main reason people read Twitter.
If it turns into a micro-blogging stream of extended self-expression, I think a lot of people won't have time for that.
Tumblr?
To be honest, I find the limit of 140 characters as its best feature because it is something that forces me to distill my thoughts in as less words as possible. A kind of exercise.
I honestly see this more of a fix. All these horrible ways of using Twitter which are already commonplace will no longer be necessary. I don’t think it will fundamentally change how Twitter is used. People already use it in that way.
If people want to use twitter in that way than it's not the right place for them, there are already similar platform out there. Twitter's core and unique feature is micro blogging platform and i think it's never loose that unique feature.
Trust me, from many, many discussions with people at Twitter, they absolutely do not see themselves as a micro-blogging platform, and do not enjoy the comparison.
I would guess the very high end of what might be considered typical would be 50-70 or something. That is a lot of blogs.
Now let's compare with twitter.
Three years ago, the average twitter user followed 100 accounts.[1]
Here is an example of an article giving 55 "must-follow" twitter accounts [2] - a simple article, saying, hey, subscribe to these 55 sources. Can you imagine someone giving you a list of 55 blogs that you simply have to subscribe to, regardless of who you are or what your interests are - for everyone? That to be in touch with the world, you must follow at least these 55 blogs?
I can certainly imagine it for tech! But, for everyone?
The percentage of world leaders who use twitter is: 80%[3] - outside of the highly reduced format, do you think people care about politics that much? Obama has 68M followers. How many do you think would stick around after even a couple of extended posts? How interesting do you think every last politician is? Because that 68M compares to the total monthly reach of New York Times and all its web presence of on the order of 50 million people. Are people really that interested in not just one, but every last politician's every last statement, than in this highly distilled and reduced form?
Twitter works because of the character limit. That's what allows the average user to follow well over a hundred accounts.
It's that simple.
-
[1] this figure was really hard to find, don't know why. http://news.yahoo.com/twitter-statistics-by-the-numbers-1531...
[2] http://greatist.com/happiness/must-follow-twitter-accounts
[3] http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/march-2013-by-the-num...
here is what I had to do:
1. write tweet, fuck, over limit
2. abbrev words, fuck still low on limit
3. remove spaces, fuck still low on limit
4. remove words and punctuations, thinking "fuck so this is what search engine feels like when one stems words", not my tweet is so not English
5. fuck still over limit or incomplete, tweet the first thought, comment on the new tweet with the rest of my story.
But why this model? FB has a limit few thousands char limits for status but in practice, only few lines will ever written on most FB statuses. People who manage to write a complete story on FB status have something meaningful to write about.
Sorry this letter is so long, I didn't have much time.
(Sorry. I'll take your downboats and be on my way. I could not resist.)
The key will be how much Twitter discourages going past 140 (or whatever the visible limit is).
But raising to 10,000 chars would probably kill Twitter for me.
I just hate trying to micromanage my words and grammar sooo much.
I have heard about Twitter looking into upping the limits for years now and I think they are over thinking the problem. Then again I have no idea if their backend is some how weirdly designed with the 140 character limit and changing that might require a lot of work. I wouldn't have thought so though. Well I should say I hope not, you never know what some devs do ;)
Removing the character limit is similar to the spam problem. It shifts the mental burden from the sender to the receiver. Instead of the sender being forced to compress, the receiver has to spend more time processing the text.
EDIT: I found where I stole this idea from: http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6207.html
Edit: mental math botched. I thought I remembered the powers of 2 better than I actually did. 160 characters would be about 10k, and 100k would buy you a whopping 163 characters.
There's a neat story on that point: http://mathforum.org/sanders/geometry/GP11Fable.html
(Also, he has fantastic penmanship.)
or a physicist.
Even mathematicians working with Cesàro sums surround such statements with "this holds only if we interpret the infinite sum defining Z to be the Cesàro sum..." [0]
Precisely none of the times I've heard the "1+2+3+4...=-1/12" bullshit has the person stating it prefaced their statement with "this holds only if we interpret the infinite sum defining Z to be the Cesàro sum..."
If you say that "1+2+3+4...=-1/12" without stating your prior assumptions, you suddenly allow anyone to make any assumption whatsoever, no matter how obscure it is. In your imaginary world, someone could walk into a store and claim that "this 95 cent pack of gum is free" because they just made the unstated assumption that all non-integers do not exist, and seconds later they could return it for a full refund of $0.95 after making the unstated assumption that in fact the rational numbers do exist. Numbers, and in fact the entire system of mathematics fail to work at all once you allow arbitrary, unstated assumptions no matter their obscurity. And in fact, the assumption that non-integer numbers do not exist is made far, far more frequently than the assumption that the infinite sum defining the sequence is the Cesàro sum.
The only difference is that assuming the non-integer numbers do not exist is a defensible assumption in many, many scenarios... but Cesàro summations are only invoked about twelve times a year, in pure math or advanced physics papers.
[0] Madras, Neal. "A Note on Diffusion State Distance." arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.07315 (2015).
$10KHere's the price for those message lengths:
141 $0.01
142 $0.03
143 $0.07
144 $0.15
145 $0.31
146 $0.63
147 $1.27
148 $2.55
149 $5.11
150 $10.23
151 $20.47
152 $40.95
153 $81.91
154 $163.83
155 $327.67
156 $655.35
157 $1,310.71
158 $2,621.43
159 $5,242.87
160 $10,485.75
There's concision, and then there's nuking the concept of the paragraph.
I for one welcome our new longer-Tweet overlords.
Length of "You can't express complex thought without multi-tweeting": 56 chars (took "literally" out, because that's incorrect).
This is not a complex thought.
Not exactly a non argument.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally
"Literally" can mean "virtually," or "figuratively."
Seems literally incorrect to me.
"I got literally hundreds of bug reports today" may not be appreciated correctly (a listener who doesn't know me might think that I got 12 and I'm just whining), but "Speaking without exaggeration, I got hundreds of bug reports today" seems airtight.
Or maybe it's time to import >>wörtlich<< into English.
If you want to prove me wrong, show me a complex thought expressed in 140 characters. Again, I agree that complex thought can result in a very interesting tweet, but the tweet will not be able to convey all the thought behind it.
That thought is pseudo-profound, not complex. In this context, "sound" is human-audible air vibration. One waving hand doesn't make any.
I’ve tried using twitter for some time now, and you end up sounding a lot more angry when you spend the 20 minutes trying to get your thoughts into 140 characters, and you’ll have to use a horrendous amount of abbreviations.
There’s no space left for polite "hey, sorry, I disagree with your thoughts on [long name of a project], I’d think you could do [feature] better if you’d look at adopting [technology]", there’s only "[project’s feature] is bad, would be better with [technology]".
Especially when you try to use German, you write half a sentence and the box is full.
Same with imgur comments, I frequently end up writing "1/12" as prefix to my comments – at that point it’s useless.
Obviously there's no right or wrong way to use Twitter, but I generally don't follow people who do more than post inane status updates like "i love tacos lol" or links to mildly interesting news articles. For me at least, that's all I want Twitter to be, and it does that admirably. If I want discourse theres room for that pretty much anywhere else on the Internet.
I suspect the majority of the problems people have with Twitter stem from expecting it to be something that it just fundamentally isn't and can't be. If you use Twitter with a desire for serious engagement with others you're almost always going to be disappointed. If you treat it as a place to put silly 140 character messages out into the world whenever you feel like it then it's much more fun. And weirdly, much more useful.
I don't think that Twitter was originally designed for real discussion and discourse, but it's become the Social Activist Platform™, and as such, discourse and discussion are almost necessities. In it's current state, however, it's 140 character format unfortunately aids and promotes ignorant and uninformed statements rooted in mob mentality, killing the possibility of any meaningful discussion or discourse, which could benefit many of the conversations that are occurring on the platform.
Twitter wasn't meant for discussion and discourse, but it's community seems to be demanding that it be exactly that.
That's just my (admittedly biased) take.
The other thing it has going for it is it encourages immediacy, which makes it fun for sports fans and journalists love it for that as well. Which then leads to the modern "immediacy vs. accuracy" problem that broadcasting faces as well. The main reason politicians like it is because that's where the journalists are at.
I think you're putting too much on Twitter if you're trying to blame it for lowering the level of discourse, or for political mobbing of people online. So much of this is a broader symptom of the Internet being accessible to so many people who are enthused but not very informed. And it happens across platforms. Facebook is worse IMO as it really leads to the lowest common denominator of political nonsense being shared out.
TL;DR: Twitter is good if you want to find people who have common interests. Or want to find out more from celebs and/or creatives. Or just from more normal people who have a cool job. It's bad if you want to talk politics, but so is 90% of the Internet.
Based on what I hear come out of the mouths of politicians, that's emphatically not true.
I tend to agree with you, but then again I've never understood the appeal of Twitter. Do people get enough entertainment out of the "i love tacos lol" tweets to continue using it day after day? You could link to mildly interesting articles, but you can hardly say anything about it in 140 characters, so why use that medium to post/reply to articles?
That said, it also privileges readily-echoes soundbytes over discussion. This has the side effect of wrecking discussion.
The most expensive medium per character is text messaging
https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing and each carrier effectively holds a monopoly on reaching that customer via that means especially since plenty of phones still can't receive any other form of electronic message.
Twitter has more than ample competition this kind of blackmail would destroy twitter.
This post describing the limitations and disadvantages of the twitter character limit couldn't have been tweeted!
Some of the most interesting ideas I've seen on Twitter were in tweetstorms, which is a pretty nasty and ugly hack itself. Proponents of the 140-char limit usually cite some notion of terseness and thought-density, but I see more half-formed ideas and deliberate grammar/spelling mangling to make things fit. That's not terseness, that's gray-matter-powered lossy compression.
But I'm also one of those crazy people who uses Facebook like others use Twitter - I don't write whole essays but 140 chars is like thinking through a straw.
(Side note: I also have a pet theory that Twitter's problems with epic shitstorms/political flamewars stems from the fact that you have people arguing politics/economics/important things with each other in 140 chars or less)
I'm pretty sure those arguments and "shit-storms" are occurring everywhere there is written text on the internet, regardless of character limitations.
On Facebook you might get some flak from your uncle, on a forum you might get into a tussle with another poster, but there are natural limits to the severity and the scale. On Twitter many of these limits are stripped away - it's very easy, and very common, to retweet someone "look at this fucking idiot" and invite your circles to pile on, many of whom will have never heard of the offender before.
This is also how harassment and abuse on Twitter is worse than other platforms - on Facebook you might get into a flamewar with your uncle and face awkward family dinners for a while, but on Twitter a dogpile is millions of users large, and you're statistically guaranteed to get a few people with legitimate screws loose in that bunch who might actually SWAT you or stalk you or otherwise take things way, way too far.
Add this to the fact that Twitter's length limits discourage nuance and encourage soundbites and you get IMO the worst intersection of soundbite culture, outrage culture, and massive built-in virality.
For example, a new site that allowed you to broadcast up to 140 character messages.
(speaking of crap formatting, I still can't get used to HN comment formatting.. apparently no way to make a line feed or a list, at least, none that's documented)
But seriously, it's ironic that Twitter limits tweets to 140char but the site and mobile app are some of the worst wastes of screen real estate I've ever seen. I keep trying to find it of some value but I just can't do it. Either nothing shows up in my feed, or I follow "must follow" people and get to hear them go on about random crap I don't care about. My real actual Twitter mobile app feed currently looks like this:
* retweet
* promoted tweet
* while you were away (1)
* while you were away (2)
* while you were away (3)
* while you were away (4)
* while you were away (5)
* actual tweet in proper chronological order (1)
* actual tweet in proper chronological order (2)
* people you may want to follow (1)
* people you may want to follow (2)
* people you may want to follow (3)
I had to scroll down 4 entire (iPhone 6) screenfuls of tweets before I got to the chronologic list of recent tweets I actually want to see, and even then, saw only 2 of them before the next chunk of junk! The light grey bar on a light grey background is poor delineation between sections, as well. It blows my mind that a mostly-text medium with such a strict character limit manages to have vastly worse information density than Facebook.
I use them differently, too, of course. Facebook feels more personal; I'm friends with real-life friends, and am a member of some groups for fun. Most of the updates feel personal to me.
Twitter I use to follow "important figures" and some friends.. but no friends tweet, and the important figures never say anything interesting.. or at least, if they do, I can't get to it, because the UI is such garbage.
That would seem to solve both issues -- short-and-sweet for those that want it, and longer as necessary.
(Note this idea has been baked for approximately 15 seconds, so I'm sure I'm missing quite a bit.)
That would also provide a better first-party equivalent to services like TwitLonger, as well as the common practice of posting a snippet and a longer text-as-image.
Imagine a satirical tweet with exactly the wrong "unnecessary" sentence removed. Suddenly your life is ruined because you said something that makes people angry.
Not as nice as being able to write the summary yourself, but certainly an interesting single-player game.
An example is the "Facebook is dead" link on HN recently. The article was about someone quitting Facebook, rather than an argument that Facebook is losing trendiness.
Now imagine a Twitter where every single tweet is similarly bait-y.
a.) These are not very accessible
b.) I am too lazy to transcribe / OCR these
c.) It defeats the purpose of Twitter
d.) It would be far more handy to have big text blobs like this in a Tweet's JSON schema Something like
{ textBlob: '...book quotes galore...'}
Make the words cheap, and twitter will turn into just another prolix platform in a sea of noise.
Absent external effects, it's easier to write a long message than write concisely.
Twitter in its current form imposes an artificial cost on long messages, which encourages you to do the extra work to write something short.
Remove that cost, and you'll get more lazy, long messages.
That's my theory, anyway.
As an engineer, you can hardcode your assumptions or make them parametric. I get that 140 chars has been a core part of the Twitter identity, and maybe there are some infrastructural aspects that have to be hardcoded to optimize for that. But if they've got `140`s sprinkled all over their code base because that was the assumption of the day, god help them.
10000/5.5 = 1818 words.
1800 words @ 250 wpm average reading speed is ~7 minutes.
(It goes without saying that not every "mega" tweet will use all 10,000 chars.)
[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=average+characters+per+word
http://www.extremetech.com/internet/79260-four-microblogging...
For German, where we have 14.3 characters per word on average[1], we get:
10'000/14.8 = 676 words.
676 words @ 250 wpm is 2 Minutes 42 Seconds.
A 2½ Minute article is very short, like a short comment in a newspaper, and would fit very well into a microblogging site.
[1] http://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/sprachratgeber/durchschnitt...
It’s hard when you need 3 or 4 tweets for a simple sentence explaining why Sony DCP projectors used to be easier for piracy than competing products.
I wonder how pissed Ev will be when his old company steals his new company's idea - especially if Jack Dorsey gets all the credit.
[1]https://medium.com/data-lab/the-optimal-post-is-7-minutes-74...
The only major change in post-140 Twitter would be the death of the Andreessen-style twerpstorm.
You'd think that's the case but I'm not so sure about that.
The hidden secret of secret of Tweetstorms is that they take up the space of multiple tweets, which means that people can retweet more times (people do retweet entire Tweetstorms!) and occupy the entire space on their followers' timelines.
Although, if you Tweetstorm when a 10k character limit exist, the shenanigans would be obvious. Anyone who pulled this would instantly get an unfollow from me, of course.
I like the idea of going back, "merging tweets" into a collection, and then writing a narrative on top of it, connecting dots and building revisions that complete it as a "post". I guess kind of like Storify.
In keeping with the bird analogy, messages will be that annoying parakeet in the pet store rather than spring time finches.
If Twitter keeps the focus on the short bursts, but still has a separate way to do "Twitter blogs" or whatever, I think it could work. If Twitter just unconditionally changes all Tweets to 10k it seems like it would kill what makes Twitter unique in the first place.
Most parakeet cages I've seen in bird stores have a bell-in-a-ball type toy. Try picking it up and ringing it sometime. For some reason, all the parakeets will stop chattering as long as the bell is ringing.
My biggest issue with Twitter's 140 character limit is it removes all opportunity for nuance. Within 140 characters you can just barely voice and opinion or thought in the most basic terms. Yes you can split your thoughts into multiple tweets but people will typically only focus on the first tweet that really expresses the basis of an idea and that's what will get shared the most. Allowing more wordy and nuanced tweets probably won't solve the social media over reactions that seem to flare up, but maybe it'll help if people aren't forced to awkwardly clarify their positions with a bunch of tweets that have to be read from the bottom up.
His comments about searching/highlighting imply that this feature might be like Medium.
> Given how much the best users of twitter hate the idea of a 10k char limit for tweets, it will definitely happen. :(
So as long as it's going to do it, can I request that it support Markdown? Medium doesn't really support it other than through an API.
It still seems like twitter is trying to find their niche. The 140 character limit is long past its purpose, but it's also kind of a defining characteristic of twitter. It forces brief comments and an easy-skim timeline, at the expense of real conversation or information exchange.
What was its purpose and why is it long past it?
It's past its purpose because noone uses Twitter via SMS and people routinely circumvent it with text in images and multi-part tweets anyway.
To allow people to use Twitter over SMS. SMS are 160 characters, so a 140 character tweet leaves room for a 20 character header to allow for metadata and actions.
You can still use Twitter this way, which is why (as of relatively recently) you couldn't post a tweet that began with the word "Get", even from the web interface.
On an old iPhone with just basic speech to text abilities I would sometimes use Bluetooth to "text twitter ..." and that worked. (Nowadays we got our Siris and Cortanas and direct app integration, but that "text twitter" is still sometimes a more reliable voice trigger than "tweet".)
I still often turn on SMS notifications for accounts I want to specifically hear from or events I'm attending.
We’re all used to the 140-character limit by now, but do you know how it started? Here’s a little history lesson for anyone wondering why they’ve got to condense their thoughts into 140-characters or less – and how to get around the limit without turning off your followers.
The origins of the 140-character limit Once upon a time, long long ago… a group of young programmers whipped up a program that could send SMS to and from a small group of recipients.
This blossomed into Twitter, a web- and mobile- based messaging system that lets users send short messages – known as tweets – to one another.
So why the 140-character limit?
Twitter was (and still is) a service that relied heavily on mobile-messaging. Sure, you can send and receive tweets on your computer, but a huge draw of Twitter in the early days was its ability to be accessed from mobile phones.
And since the worldwide standard length of SMS (or text messages on phones) is 160-characters, the founders of Twitter thought it wise to stay within that bounds so as not to inundate people’s phones with 3 or 4 staggered, delayed, or even partially missing 4-part messages.
140-characters was chosen as a good length, leaving 20 characters for the username of the sender. This way, anyone receiving a tweet via SMS would get the whole tweet in a single text message, with nothing spilling over into a second or third message that pops up minutes later.
http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/twitter-basics-why-140-cha...
Counting @ mentions means that any reply is immediately handicapped (although, for a broadcasting-style platform, maybe that was the whole point).
Your limit increases the more engagement you have.
Or maybe everyone starts off with 10k but the limit decreases based on engagement. Might be a way to reward people who create interesting content.
Although I'm sure someone at fiverr would be offering a service to counteract that idea via bots seconds afterwards.
1. 140 char tweets aren't indexed very well by search engines. Writing blog posts or 400+ char tweets? Way better. More indexable content. More user growth. Wall street is satisfied for a few months.
2. The notion of expressing yourself (or whatever you want to call blogging) is easy to explain (WordPress, Tumblr, Medium). I'd argue that it's much easier to explain blogging than Twitter. By introducing something less ambiguous it should help user growth.
As much as I would hate 10k char tweets, I can see why they are doing this.
Minor changes to the current product won't drive the growth they and Wall Street are looking for.
It is puzzling why Twitter refuses to encourage 3rd party applications to do peripheral things while they still get the data.
That way, they focus on the core experience for most of their users.
10 000 and it becomes a poor attempt at medium. 140 characters allows text to be like images where you can skim.
Occasionally, you see tweetstorms and decide if you want to "view more"
Anyway, it's their turf.
Do check out http://writerack.com and have fun with it until it is no longer useful :)
The traditional blogging platforms that came before Twitter generally failed as broad-base social media platforms because of the walls of text people would write. If you're an average person, nobody wants to read your wall of text about some childhood experience, but people might be interested in your one-liners about news, celebrities, friends, etc.
I think the changes that are causing them to consider a 10,000-character limit are:
1. A larger percentage of Twitter traffic is celebrities/marketers, and people trying to connect with celebrities/marketers (not friends connecting with friends). Character limits don't matter for this traffic because quality/virality is either guaranteed (celebrities/marketers) or irrelevant (consumers trying to connect to celebrities/marketers).
2. It's difficult to sell text as short-form shareable content now that everyone's sharing images, gifs, and really short videos. If the text isn't going to be shareable, they might as well lift the character limit and expand its utility as a general feature.
Personally I like the idea. The way I use Twitter is to see what public figures and organizations are saying publicly, so a higher character limit is 100% upside for me.
But, I don't use Twitter for long form content. I do use Twitter as a way for people to get me interested in long form, or to raise awareness of something.
If my feed gets clogged with long form, I'm moving on. Too much info, wrong use case.
Seems to me Twitter could gather a lot more value out reconsideration of how hostile they have been to the ecosystem that grew up around Twitter.
- Content creators/websites that use twitter to funnel users to their websites will not use this feature.
- Tweetstorms can be solved much more elegantly (e.g. click to expand "continuation tweets")
- A tweet is a single sentence. Human brains have limits.
Every media distribution site atm seems to try to also own the content.
Twitter's value isnt that you have to write short messages but that others can scan dozens of ideas/tweets of multiple people in a very short time. They wont take that away. Most likely you will even have to attach a 1400 tweet to the post.
If we increase the character limit how does it foster innovation in the realm of human to human interaction? I mean, they might as well be old school print media at this point, slightly democratized to allow celebridiots to poorly market themselves and occasionally post something offensive which will create media outrage.
How will news anchors have segments where they "read people's tweets"? We don't have a segment called "Anderson Cooper reads the New York Times." They're direct competitors!
It's crazy! It makes no sense, Twitter has gone too far this time! People will just keep typing their stupid thoughts to fill the tweet up to the stupid limit because they have to be entertaining in long format. I don't have time for that shit!
Writing posts with more that 140 can potentially get many FB users, nevertheless TW should take care of the its current users. I notice many incoherences of the web app, for instance the top menu, on left where pop/up and navigation are mixed.
Second, the mobile app is very wired I receive notifications about message or followers that appears on my notification tabs randomly.
In conclusion, I love TW and I'm not a FB user, but I'm honest my twitter timeline is a bunch of Ads and I follow Twitter just because I love the concept of it.
Meanwhile, Twitter needs to figure out how they are preventing spammers and spam-bots from infiltrating the environment where humans supposed to tread...only if, they wish humans to use their service.
However, I've never used Weibo. Can any describe the differences between Weibo and longer-form Twitter, and talk about Weibo's strengths and weaknesses?
The problem is missing interesting Tweets. My timeline is flooded with new tweets. Better flagging to read later, algorithms that say you might find this most interesting, filtering would be welcome and are needed.
Can you expand on that? Do the tweets contain links, or do they just pack enough meaning into 140 characters that you'd like to think about it for some time before replying?
Personally, I think that anything that needs to be bookmarked later like that belongs in an RSS feed.
The last point also touches on an issue I have with the Twitter Android client: there's no way to refresh a tweet to see new replies. Even if I go back to my timeline and tap on the tweet again, it'll just show whatever it has in the local cache. Normally that's good behavior, but a pull-to-refresh (an action patented by Twitter, no less) would be absolutely ideal.
Recently I wanted to follow a well known Java Evangelist, but their Java tweets were mixed with lots of politics tweets. Even though I agreed with the politics, I only wanted to read the Java related stuff - but it was like drinking from a firehose so I gave up.
And also being able to disable retweets for Lists would be nice too.
Now long-form tweets trying to fix the redicilous problems of having to screenshot text to fit your message in, agonizing over short URLs or character by character shortcuts just to get a tweet out.
Any significant innovations or leaps forward from Twitter that we're not what people have been trying to do?
Twitters biggest problem is that they are a protocol router more than a destination. And so while people use it to find content they consume this content somewhere else out of reach for twitters add engine.
Now that people will start writing on twitter this will mean a lot more time is spent on twitter consuming content on twitter and reading ads on twitter.
With this they get to keep the protocol part while keeping users longer on their platform to consume content.
We already have five-craptillion blogging platforms and I feel this change would morph Twitter into yet another one.
I can understand the motivation, but I'm not a fan of social networks tendency to be THE PLACE WHERE YOU DO EVERYTHING NOW.
I've had an account since 2009, but didn't start using it until 2014. It was work at first - I didn't "get" it - but i stuck with it, and gradually i enjoyed it more. All my tweets went through to faceebok, where they recieved more positive feedback than my typical facebook posts.
People can read 160 characters of text quickly, and enjoy it. Long paragraphs, not so much.
Twitter killed this years ago when it acquired TweetDeck.
This is funny because everything Twitter has been doing lately has been mostly done (and stripped down ever-since) in TweetDeck years ago!
All that's needed now is markdown or html support...
Without the ability to format the longer text, 'Tweets' will just end up being unreadable.
Only the facts that there's (currently) no policy against pseudonyms, bots and multiple accounts and that there's no useless crap games like Farmville.
[1] Few years ago I'm sure it was like that, they might've changed to a private API since.
Opened at 22.64 on Jan 4th, going as low as 22.19
Opened at 22.79 on the 5th and closed 21.90
I think this rumour was irrelevant to the price change
twitter spam has been of limited value due to the constraints.
would be more useful to move links, @mentions, etc. out of the character limit.
but hey, if they do it, it opens the opportunity for another unicorn that will be the snapchat of twitter.
Seriously: Jack Dorsey is definitely worth his 100 millions if he can come up with innovations like this; raising the number of character? Holy shmoly, what a genius! A veritable dare devil!
10k blog posts with 140 charsbof content to decipher.... No thanks. Showing the first 140 only with a "read more" button does not fix that.
Rip twitter
That said they started emailing me profiles that I viewed and didn't follow which feels invasive.
By running it as a business and they're trying to force a square peg into a round hole and slowly undermining its value.