1-bit communication can get a lot done.
Not sure? (don't do this) Try calling your local emergency service (911 in the US) and hanging up.
Not sure? (don't do this) Try calling your local emergency service (911 in the US) and hanging up.
There are a lot of situations where one bit communications can make big changes. Sending a voltage down the wire to the 'launch' relay on some missile will do a lot worse. In the end, any actuator anywhere is going to respond to just a single bit changing state. So we're in violent agreement about that.
But to reduce the available bandwidth to nothing when lots is available has me puzzled. Twitter found that reducing the number of characters (by necessity, rather than by choice) launched a new medium. I can see how taking that to its logical conclusion (from 840 bits to 1 bit) may create an entirely new mode of expression.
At the same time I fear it will not leave them with a value that is is 1/840th of twitter, that '1' is perilously close to a '0'. In that sense it is like 'pair', which tries (tried?) to be a social network for 2.
Maybe someone should come up with a 0 bit medium?
I believe there are more than 65536 code points assigned so a tweet should be able to carry over 2240 bits of information -- 2240+ Yos.
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Incidentally, in Japanese and BEV (probably adopted from jp), the word "yo" has an entirely different meaning.
[0] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
Edit: added endnote
If your language would only allow for 140 bytes you'd be really out of luck if your language routinely requires multi-byte sequences in UTF-8.
Hm. You could do a 'tweet compression' trick where you use a fixed number of bit from a subset of UTF-8 that you know is multi-byte (selected for the extra long sequences) in order to put longer messages on twitter, and then use a decompressor to turn it back into ascii.