Coming soon: express even more in 140 characters
blog.twitter.com
blog.twitter.com
This is terrible. They are introducing a way to broadcast mentions without using .@, which is great. So why also making non-reply mentions forcefully broadcasted, with no way to hide them!?
I don't want my @ThreeUKSupport tweets to go to all my followers.
I suppose this will force more use of DMs for interactions with businesses.
Likely added in response to many service providers using twitter as a support channel.
http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/12/twitter-decides-were-not-sm...
For example, I might want to follow scientists' tweets on science, but not their political or favourite sport team tweets. Right now it's either all or nothing, but why can't people categorize their tweets so only people interested in them see them? This would be better for both parties.
Undoubtedly this just sounds like a good idea to the "few orthogonal abstractions" hacker brain, but with the right UI it could work.
I'm missing out on some interesting discussions for sure, but I'd have to be on Twitter half a day each day to scroll through all this stuff.
I seem to remember some celebrity being mocked because their first tweet was unintentionally not broadcast as it started with '@'. I wouldn't be surprised if many users are initially confused by this feature, so hopefully this change will make things easier.
> New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That means you’ll no longer have to use the ”.@” convention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) If you want a reply to be seen by all your followers, you will be able to Retweet it to signal that you intend for it to be viewed more broadly.
What if I don't want a reply to be broadcast in everyone's feed? (Not that it's private, but it's just not relevant and usually lacks context). Or are they saying that if you want it shown to everyone, retweet it and it'll show up to everyone?
Is that compatible with API consumers or the SMS interface? (Or are these both dead?)
If you reply via an app or their website, they attach the id of the tweet you are replying to in their database. This is how they can show you a conversation timeline.
Note btw that their new "retweet with a comment" system breaks said timeline tracking...
1) "new" tweets - reach all followers
2) replies - not seen by followers
3) retweets - not sure if these are "new" tweets, but they also reach all followers
Quote retweets do what you'd expect, though.
I hope you meant the proverbial "you". Personally, I can't find a reason to expect any particular behavior in that case. I've never been able to figure twitter out.
Hopefully this is just for replying to people mentioned in the original tweet, otherwise spam bots could have a field day with this. I'm guessing the people at Twitter already recognised this though.
[1] https://support.twitter.com/articles/127871 [2] https://twitter.com/vmdanilov/status/735142731945803780
It's entirely understandable to not understand why people use twitter, but how to use twitter is incredibly simple, beyond probably any other social network.
I taught an MBA class with 11 students. They were required to use Twitter for a group assignment.
My shock when a large majority of them had never used it, and a large minority of the new users just couldn't figure out how to use it, and why it was useful.
Perhaps, it would have been easier to just increase the general limit to 160 characters; avoiding so many work-arounds and different rules. I wonder what impact of 20 more characters would be in terms of hardware and bandwidth at Twitter's scale.
1/2: @linuxhiker: RT @CALComputerCLub: Hey @ubuntu we donated 3 @lenovo laptops that we put Ubuntu 16.04 on to 3 students at a local middle school! https://t.co
2/2: /MArvqjNtip/s/KtTS
Twitter if you're reading, I'm ok with increasing limits on replies (with context) but don't raise the limit on ALL tweets.
@511NY: Closure on #BayonneBridge Both directions from New York Side to New Jersey Side https://t.co/Axv6AP1O0A/s/BiVD
m.twitter.com/511NY
I'm sure they're concerned less with the technical impact than the risk of changing the product somewhat drastically. The char limit is a fundamental aspect of twitter. It forces people to create curt, easily digestible content. Expanding that limit might have pretty bad side effects, such as people communicating the same message they would have in 140 chars, but more verbosely (which weakens the product).
On the other hand, their incredibly annoying "here's what you missed" and "non-linear timeline" feature will help limit that, combining the chocolate that I hate with the peanut butter that I can't stand into something approximately edible.
I can't say that this is an objectively bad move, but it definitely sounds like it'll erode Twitter's usefulness to me.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2016/01/25/twitt...
As for images, here's a limit of four per post, and Twittwr groups multi into a display with one URL. Videos, Vines and polls are capped at one.
It's possible to have many, many usernames in a reply, but I don't know if there is an upper bounds.
I always liked the idea of stuffing data in metadata. For me, most tweets are insubstantial and thinly veiled metadata. There are always those claiming a tweet 'means' something but the context is usually entirely missing, hence the phenomenon of 'subtweets' and worse: the dreaded tweetstorm.
I could even encode arbitrary data in a JPEG if I wanted and get back data byte for byte. I just wonder what my followers would make of such tweets and if they are clever enough to fuzz the JPEG for meaning and context.
This is so bad it's getting hilarious. I mean, either the leadership is completely unaware of issues people raise for years, or they are and intentionally neither comment on nor fix them. Either way - WTF? I honestly think they're just delusional about being too big to fail at this point. Another social network will make them the latest MySpace though, just a question of time.
Before: some @jerk keeps sending annoying tweets to @victim, but since they aren't .@ tweets only the victim sees them in their timeline, or people who follow both @jerk and @victim.
Now: @jerk continues to send annoying tweets to @victim, but now everyone who follows @jerk sees the attacks, so if they're like minded they can now pile on @victim too.
With everything that keeps going on, including celebrities leaving Twitter due to harassment issues and having to seriously bulk up their harassment rules and enforcement departments... you'd think they'd think about some of this stuff first.
But wait, it gets worse:
https://twitter.com/chrisremo/status/735115850445783043
You can now @mention up to 50 people, but ONLY THE FIRST WILL SHOW. So now you can easily harass huge groups of people and they won't even know why they're getting the tweet in the first place!
facepalm
I'm not saying there's no issue with online harassment (there is), but this doesn't make it any worse.
Now it's automatic, and possibly unintended. Send a slightly rude tweet to someone you're mad at? Maybe sarcasm that some of your followers don't see as sarcasm? Now your friend may get harassed by your followers.
But @jerk is already .@ mentioning his (her?) @victims because that's how @jerk is.
The difference is you had to be intentional about it before by adding the period. That's no longer necessary. So not only is it slightly easier, but people you don't set out to 'unleash your followers on' may now get attacked when before you were only doing a basic reply to them.
I'm not saying harassment doesn't exist, I'm saying this makes it WAY EASIER and that's a BIG ISSUE.
Conspiracy theory: they are doing this to fill our timelines with noise so we welcome all the algorithmic changes to the holy and sacred chronological order of our timelines.
There needs to be a warning of some kind. People seem very unclear on this and don't get that putting something into the tweet box is like shouting it on the street corner. People can and should be expected to shout back.
And when the public replies are from a swarm of shortlived anonymous accounts, but direct a storm of abuse at an individual's persistent online identity, as well as often any accounts with whom they have interacted... that's not just people shouting back, that's something wholly different and unique to the twitter environment.
As in, whether it happens enough to restrict the way most people interact with the site.
As a counterpoint, most of the onsite crowing I see about "abuse" and "harassment" on Twitter is of the "I said something publicly, responding to me publicly is harassment" variety. And then when I go look at the timelines, I don't see anything particularly awful.
Anyone with that mindset should start a blog.