The fact that it took this long for them to make such an obvious change speaks to how afraid they are (were?) to challenge core assumptions about the product.
Imo, it shows that, like many of us, they don't really understand why Twitter became so popular. That being the case, they don't know what they can and cannot safely change.
To me, Twitter works because many people prefer to read 100 headlines and know a little about everything, than reading just a big essay. Have a variety of views, rather than just one.
It is better for the reader, not so for the writer. Because of that, I do not understand why they focus so much on getting more writers (login) than readers (views).
I think looking at it this way is a bit naive. While I agree that "attachments" shouldn't take up tweet text, the 140 character limit is a core component of the service. Call it a micro blog or a mass SMS, Twitter is 140 characters.
That said, I think most comments are missing the point - having attachments not take up characters really won't make the service any more useful to the mainstream... That's the real problem in my opinion.
I don't know, if you post a link as well as an image you're losing 24 characters from a 140 character limit. You lose just less than 20% of the characters available. I think a 20% increase is fairly substantial.
Especially considering most changes are pandering to brands, and this is a use case that we use a lot. (Whether Twitter is a useful channel aside...) extra space for copy will always go down well with the people paying the bills.
The more you think about Twitter the more you understand it, including why it works, and at Twitter, lots of people are thinking about Twitter, so they probably know that SMSes worked like conversation, where the tech forced you to be polite, i.e. not ramble on about something without letting the other party say anything, they should just listen. SMS conversations flows like a oilite chat about the weather. Quick, brief and with nice pauses in between. Maybe that's not what they were after but isn't that what Twitter achieved?
My experience is a lot like that. However one of the core issues Twitter has had in the recent past is that many users were not experiencing polite conversation on twitter. They were experiencing harassment instead.
It's hard to blame them for that, though. They made a blog with a 140-character limit and it became one of the most valuable companies in the world. Who knows what it will become if they fiddle with anything?
It wasn't really a blog though, right? Maybe it began as "a real-time blog aggregator, where blogs only have titles". I believe nowadays it's the network effect that keeps them, not the technology itself.
Still I think the 140 character limit was in part due to their continued success; I know when I look at a tweet, I'm not going to get a 1000-word dissertatino on a subject - I will get bite-size pieces of info (for the most part, except for the multi-part diatribes or conversations, which I generally ignore).
Link anxiety is a real thing - I'm less likely to click if it's going to absorb my attention for 5m+.
Fair point though, it's confusing. Can't you edit your post and remove the correction now that it's irrelevant? And then we can delete this entire unnecessary subthread :)
Whilst Twitter has someone tweet the occasional gem, it's genuinely few and far between. I honestly feel that the format was great when it was only really programmers who used it (and even then I'm not so sure...) but limiting people to 140 characters, even discounting images and links, means most people can't convey views on most complex issues.
I have an unpopular view, but I'm firmly of the belief that all Twitter did was amplify the voice of celebrities - most of whom have not much to really say, made it easier for abusive speech to be targeted towards individuals and amplified moral outrage. Facebook has as well, but nowhere near as badly as Twitter.
Edit: like I say, it's an unpopular view! If only someone would tell me why my view is wrong or unreasonable. In 140 characters...
Edit 2: It's suddenly occurred to me that if someone was able to give a highly convincing argument in favour of Twitter's ability to convey all complex arguments and views and did so with a lengthy response, but there was no way of distilling the message to 140 characters... would that invalidate it?
Definitely twitter is entirely about who you follow. I tried it out early on, saw no value, and ignored it for a year or two, until a friend convinced me it has some value, and there are two uses I find.
I follow several programmers (some internet famous, some merely who I've found from using a project they worked on or someone else's retweet), and through that, find it interesting to get a glimpse at what other people are doing or finding challenging, or see when there's buzz around some new technology in my space.
The other thing I find it useful for is local updates in my (relatively small) city. Traffic updates, road closures, police activity, events, etc. The local public works and city hall accounts are surprisingly active and often useful. I also follow a handful of restaurants nearby the office: they often tweet lunch specials.
I follow exactly zero mainstream celebrities, never look at 'Moments', 'trending', etc -- I find those things full of crap I simply don't care about at all.
That has been my observation as well. It's quite useful as an segregator for local information. Probably because of the character limitation. I think there's a psychological positive to it as in "well I only have to type about 140 characters" (said the event organizer, police pr person, town hall person etc.)
The change will be nice because it'll hopefully be easy to parse the metadata for attachments (images, url) and it should be more elegant to handle them in general than regexping them out.
What's the best strategy for avoiding harassment? I have a Twitter account, but very, very rarely use it. It's my biggest concern really.
Knowing strategies to avoid just nasty people is the main issue I have with it. Like, if you go into Twitter and see that you have a whole bunch of Gamer Gayers targeting you (just an example, I can't see how I would be a target!) then I'd imagine having no Twitter would be preferable to actually having a Twitter account!
You don't have to actually post anything. I use Twitter to consume information, not to blast it. Sometimes I'll retweet a project or maybe post an interesting bit of code, but that's unlikely to attract any negative attention. Avoid posting or retweeting contentious information, you'll be fine.
I'd imagine having no Twitter would be preferable to actually having a Twitter account!
To some people it's so valuable to use as a means of participating in their community of choice that they're willing to keep using it despite severe harrasment.
Not being a woman gives you a big advantage against harrasment. But it can come from all sorts of weird places. My wife is a big Eurovision tweeter and encountered people who search for "Macedonia" to tweet Greek nationalist abuse at.
You're only likely to be 'targetted' by anyone if you post strong opinions on contentious topics. Of course, that doesn't mean you shouldn't, but you should be prepared to defend your views or ignore certain reactions. This is all just real life, after all.
I think it depends who you choose to follow. Twitter can be different things to different people. I've never been a big fan of Twitter myself, but I follow about a dozen programmers and a few sporting brands and I get some value from that.
Your argument of Twitter being better when only programmers used it doesn't really apply if you only follow programmers, does it?
I have never been a fan of the concept. You have to work really hard to force an interesting thought into 140 characters, which leads most people just post throwaway snark and dark humor. And reading backwards through a chain of posts to simulate a real post is just stupid. I made several attempts to use the thing, anyway, because "everyone else was using it."
I eventually came to use 2 accounts, one anonymous, to interact with brands and personalities (but I repeat myself), and one personal, to keep up with people I knew first-hand. The former devolved into just ranting about everything that I found sub-optimal (usually about the .NET workflow for my day job), and the latter didn't generate enough interesting activity to care about. Both were just negative pressures on my daily activity, so I finally just shut down both.
Twitter is not great for complex arguments over differing views. Hardly anywhere on the internet is, though! In order to do that you need a small heavily moderated community.
Twitter is great for zeitgeist, silliness, mass-participation solidarity politics (this isn't very thoughtful, yes, but that's not always the most important thing), following live events, international fandoms, and kibitzing.
It was originally a blogging service - people would use it as an online diary (like livejournal) and follow personal friends. The broadcast/aggregation aspect came later.
that's correct. don't know about today, but SMS users were still fairly substantial in 2011 when Twitter introduced native photo uploads. they wanted to be able to include the photo URL in the SMS.
Essentially a tweet ID should be a pointer to "latest version", but with historical versions preserved and available at the same visibility level as the parent (typically public) and a small indicator would show that it has been edited and the history is available.
But all of those, "Damn I made a typo or dumb spelling (thx mobile keyboard) and yet it has been replied to or re-tweeted already"... all of that is solved by edit with visible history.
I write "I love cats!" You RT it. I edit it to "I am Al Queda." The FBI visits you.
Case 2:
I write "I am Al Queda." I edit it to "I love cats!" before you see it. You like cats, too, so you RT it. The FBI has a slow feed, so they see that you endorsed my Al Queda membership. They pay you a visit.
---
From a systems point of view, when your whole stack is designed around immutability (so you can serve archives of past tweets from append-only CDNs, for example) it may be nigh impossible to add editing.
I think it already happened with a troll baiting racists. He waited for a lot of RT then changed the source of the embedded racist picture with something like "I am a big disgusting stupid racist". Something like that. It was a good one, though.
Just imagine the gargantuan changes that could be necessary for small tweaks like that. Twitter was built on RoR originally, so it was probably a pretty standard relational model, then they did massive scaling for huge read/write loads, then they did massive scaling for real time features, god knows how hard it would be just to add a foreign key. I really, really, want to take a day and just go through all their engineering blogs after only glimpsing a few..
Honestly, if they only designed to scale and did not anticipate iterating on the product, they deserve to fail. My guess is that this not a trivial change but worth the effort.
I can see the use case if it's a extremely short edit window.. something like 30-60s, basically to catch that stupid typo. That doesn't solve the abuse angles but it gives a much smaller opportunity for it to happen.
Short of [mega star], few tweets see much favoriting/RTing in that window.
Exactly! I'd say I am strongly against the ability to edit tweets. I'd even put it higher than the strict reverse chronological flow of tweets that I prize so much that I still allow Twitter to send me tweets by SMS.
Edit seems much harder to implement. This basically adds some metadata to the Tweet model instead of embedding it within the body text. That's a change and it needs to be implemented all over, but it is pretty backwards compatible.
It seems that one of the fundamental assumptions is that Tweets are immutable. Changing that could break all kinds of things and would probably their systems significantly more complicated.
Facebook posts aren't as public-facing by default. AFAIK there's no FB equivalent to the retweet, in that the content of a FB share is not quite the same as the relation between a retweet and the original tweet.
Do you think these moves can save what Twitter use to be once? I believe not. Twitter has lost the social game. They never pivoted when Facebook was making continuous efforts to slay them. And in that time, they lost a lot of their audience to SnapChat, Instagram, WhatsApp and many other apps.
Isn't that the difference between Facebook and Twitter? Twitter got stuck on their once-innovative features. Facebook is changing more quickly than people can keep track of.
There's a lot of weird misunderstandings about how Twitter worked in the early days. I.E. "SMS encoded in 7-bit is 140 bytes." Something about native photo urls. A lot of this, I think, is because people lack context of what the social media and technological landscape looked like in 2006.
Twitter basically started on SMS, back in the day. There wasn't really an app because there weren't major smartphone platforms outside of PalmOS and Blackberry. A lot of my friends made SMS posts to Facebook or LiveJournal, but you never got comments or responses back, so it was very one-way.
That's where Twitter really hooked you back then. You signed up, registered your phone number, and tweets got sent as SMS messages to your phone. The 140 limit provided 18 characters for a username, colon, space, and the tweet. There were commands for following, blocking, etc. and later, direct messaging.
So you got tweets back from people you followed when you sent out a tweet. It really, truly was, as other folks have said in here, mass SMS.
You'd meet someone at a bar, and just send follow NewFunPerson to the Twitter short code and bam, their tweets were texted to you.
All the other stuff that people like about microblogging was just a side effect. Twitter was written to get to people's phones back when the only universal for mobile platforms (in the United States at least) were that you could send a text message. That immediacy, the ability to blast out something quick and get the replies back on your phone was everything.
Also, at a time when Facebook was still struggling with the fact that "Friends" were a two-way street (Following and Pages weren't a thing yet), the one-way nature of the follow relationship allowed you a lot of access to celebrities with minimal effort on the part of the celebrity. You just found Britney Spears, hit follow, and done. She (rather, her publicist) did exactly nothing to get you there, and now you know there's a new single coming out exclusively at FYE tomorrow. Cha-ching.
Twitter seized upon all the weak points of Facebook, made do with what was available in mobile, and hit gold. After that, when mobile apps hit, Twitter took all those interesting "side effects" of their 140 character limit and built on those instead, pivoting to emphasize microblogging, hashtags, and immediacy, since SMS wasn't there. And, to be honest, these things are very, VERY likely something that you get because of 140 characters.
What I find stupid is that the length of usernames counts in the message. A message to @myfriend can be longer than a message to @myfriendblessednaycursedwithalongername
My understanding is that actually there is no extra 20, it's precisely the length of an SMS. SMS is 160 characters, yes -- but in a 7-bit encoding (which is actually transmitted as a 7-bit encoding, not padded to octets like ASCII). That makes 140 bytes, which is what Twitter allows (or presumably originally allowed; I guess now longer characters still only count for 1 rather than multiple).
I don't think it did. Phone numbers are not included in the length of SMS messages - the destination is separate header data that is used in routing and not considered part of the message body. If I sent a message to a special "four digit" phone number or to a full 10-digit number, or even an international text message (not mms) with 40 digits in the address, the message length is not in any way shortened as a result. (Of course once a UDH is needed to deal with message concatenation, etc (which never really work, anyway) the limit is reduced to 153 characters - still longer than twitter's (lame) limit, in all cases.)
The whole "we need twenty characters to set aside the destination" was such a hollow rational that never made any sense. IIRC, it was revealed at some point that the 140 character message limit for tweets was basically the result of someone sitting down and doing a brief, informal testing of whatever they thought to be "the average sms message" and that's the number they ended up with.
> the destination is separate header data that is used in routing and not considered part of the message body
Right but how could Twitter have put data into the separate header in an SMS message? They can't do that. Hence the 140 character limit (the 160 hard maximum for them being able to put into a message and then minus 20 characters for commands).
Possible, but would make the user experience worse as then they couldn't reply to the text, if they wanted to respond (send a tweet back, etc.) they would have to go out of the message, find the Twitter number, open it up and reply there.
Anyone wanting to bypass the 140 limit is already doing so using an image with text in it. And anyone who spams really long messages using URLs is going to see their followers count drop pretty rapidly.
Hasn't twitter been replacing long URLs with their own short URLs for a while now? So this change probably won't make a difference, assuming users will still have to hover the link to see the tooltip of the full URL.
Twitter's job right now is to figure out how to make their UX less niche and grow market share before they lose ground to the Whatsapps and Snapchats of the world, not to police edge cases that are better managed by simple social norms.
My point is that this will become the new social norm, much like now it is the norm to write short cryptic messages that readers may or may not understand.
I find it quite frustrating. I can easily say what I want on other platforms because I can write what I need to without worrying about every single word.
Twitter makes me stop and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and finally get something that fits in 140 and makes sense for the most part after the third read if you understand me and all the context surrounding the thing I said.
I suppose it's at least partially generational for me but it seems so inelegant. Like we're in a global bit shortage.
I mostly disagree. Sure, I've been frustrated at times when I can't express an idea in 140 characters, but in general, I think the limitation is a benefit. As a creator, it makes me distill my tweet to the purest essence of what I'm trying to say, and as a consumer, it lets me scan through my timeline quickly.
Also, there's nothing stopping people from tweeting an idea and including a link to a blog/gist/whatever where they add more context.
And if Twitter does expand the limit, I hope they do it in a way that is essentially a structured version of a link to something else. For example, keep the 140 character limit, but also let people attach a longer note – up to, say, 5000 characters, maybe with simple Markdown formatting. Support it in all official clients and give 3rd-party clients a way to support it too.
I have no problem with them expanding the limit as long as I can still scroll through my timeline, seeing 140-max tweets with an option to click on one to see the expanded version, without leaving my Twitter client or loading a whole webpage. A worse option would be to just show the first 140 characters of a longer note. I think there's value in forcing people to be concise, but I also get that there's value in letting people post longer messages and keeping all of that content in-network.
> Sure, I've been frustrated at times when I can't express an idea in 140 characters, but in general, I think the limitation is a benefit.
Doesn't that lead to a tendency for low quality content (content that can be consumed in a few seconds, like animated gifs, quotes, etc)? I usually want to read in-depth articles and editorials, or thoughtful comment threads.
Yeah, fair point. It's nearly impossible to explore a big, high-quality idea on Twitter, but I personally use it mostly as a discovery tool, not a discussion or exploration tool.
Based on the people I follow, I get exposed to a lot of news and ideas I might have otherwise missed, but I don't need or want Twitter to be the place where I dig in for more details. I'm fine clicking a link or Googling something if I think it's interesting enough to warrant further investigation.
I guess my main concern is that if Twitter tries to be all things to all people it's going to lose its special utility as a discovery engine. In other words, I don't want Twitter to become Facebook or a glorified RSS reader. For me, Twitter is the best source for breaking news and ideas ignored by mainstream media, sprinkled with tidbits from friends I know IRL.
In general, I'm happy with what it is now, perhaps with some better controls for blocking and preventing abuse. If they can find a way to keep the concise sharing/discovery aspect while integrating longer content, I'm cool with that – albeit a bit skeptical.
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--
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Finding the core of an idea always takes more time than writing a wall of text. But in a world where a message is read much more often than it's written it makes no sense to offload this cost onto the reader.
You need to remove all nuance to fit any reasonably complex idea in 140 characters . And so we're left with soundbites and absolutes, the backbone of all good discussions!
I feel really stupid when I try to read tweets because half the time I can't figure out what it actually being said because either there is context missing or there are odd abbreviations... or idk... :(
Isn't the solution to that not using Twitter? If you want Facebook/Google+/... you know where to find them; the 140-char thing is the whole point of Twitter.
Concision is Twitter's only real point of differentiation. If they let people post blog posts, then it becomes identical to any other social blogging service. Why would they want to do that?
> Concision is Twitter's only real point of differentiation.
Really, the size is an artifact of the early importance of SMS as a mechanism for Twitter. If SMS isn't important to Twitter anymore, I can see why it makes sense to reconsider the limit.
Even if concision is a positive differentiator, there's no reason a limit based on SMS's limitations must be treated as unalterable.
Restrictions are not always good even if the ultimate goal is concise messages. It's hard finding anyone's twitter feed nowadays where people are not getting around the character limit by including screenshots of text. It's EVERYWHERE and it's not easily indexed to be searched.
They have to increase the limit otherwise people will get tired of using the workarounds (because, let's face it, it's practically impossible to have any kind of meaningful conversation at 140 characters at a time). It won't be to 5,000 but I would be surprised if they don't eventually go up to, say, 500 max.
There were things like Tweet Longer, and TwitPic (before Twitter had images) and lots of other little services that built on top of Twitter.
Twitter then started doing a lot of that stuff on its own and tried to kill off the other services (3rd party clients like Falcon Pro, TwitPic, etc.)
What was once a beautiful ecosystem to support this interesting 140 character thing got gobbled back up by a company that realized it needed to monetize.
I expected them to display the first 140 characters or so then have longer content expand upon tapping into the tweet once they started introducing those cards into the tweets.
I'm sure the spammers and hashtag abusers will be delighted at this change. More opportunity to stuff a tweet #with #all #sorts #of #extra #hashtags. /s
He's not saying they don't, just that now there will be more characters remaining for extra hashtags that would previously have been used up by the image/links.
Real question. I avoided Twitter for years, and finally bit the bullet recently.
The problem is my feed is out of control. Is there a way to filter it?
For example, I want to only match the travel deals by regex (my city), the politics stuff by popularity, etc.
I was under the impression that Twitter closed off their API to 3ed parties, so maybe this is no longer possible.
On a side note, my current company recently switched to a MicroService framework based on Twitter Finagle / Finatra. At first, I was grumpy (damn Hipsters, another failure a la Node and Mongo), but as I learn more about it and Scala, I'm really impressed!
For me, the best way to deal with it has been "Lists" (note: they're hard to figure out and use, and the interface and location of lists is different on every platform).
Twitter has long known that feed management is a major issue for users (especially new users). Unfortunately, they seem unhurried to do something about it.
Twitter's onboarding process is a mess. Last time I checked they offer up some "famous" people for you to follow, and then leave you to it to work out how to extract value from the feed.
If you can be bothered to spend hours setting up lists and/or carefully curating who you follow you might be able to extract value from your feed. Failing that, a third party app like Tweetdeck might help. IMO all of this is too much hard work.
A lot of people are quick to jump on the criticise Twitter bandwagon here - but I think A) this is a good compromise between giving people what they want and a bit more freedom without losing the core aspect of the service and B) there are plenty of people that like Twitter the way it is and now no longer use sites like Facebook because Twitter is good at what it's good at - sharing small pieces of information, globally, without intruding on your life.
Could this be seen as some kind of attempt to hold-off Snapchat/Instagram photo-sharing competition and keep attention in their platform? Personally I don't like the image taking away from the limit, feeling pretty indifferent on the links part. Overall my impression is that this would be a reasonable change, whereas taking a hammer to the 140 limit as a general concept might not be a proper avenue.
I doubt it. The sharing models and overall experience of Snapchat sharing and Twitter are radically different and this doesn't change it in a meaningful way.
This sounds like the number of photos could be unlimited as number of photos is also affected by the 140 char limit. This kept the quality of photos / videos high. So could expect galleries of rubbish / low quality attached to a tweet?
I would venture to guess that fewer and fewer of their users are on sms interfaces for Twitter, and more than 90% are on smart phones. Thus the character limit isn't as big of a deal.
Stackexchange comments behave the same way, and it has always bugged me. Maybe they will notice this and change the char count behavior in comments as well?
You can do that already. Storing arbitrary data in long URL's has been possible since the introduction of URL shorteners (play.rust-lang.org uses this extensively)
Yes, but if URLs don't count against your char limit, then it becomes more attractive. Previously there would be no point in trying to hide data in short links, because they still counted against your character count
Twitter popularized those URL shortening services. It is now kinda like Chinese foot binding tradition(making feet shorter to conform to social expectations) - was popular for some time, but then it went away. The same could happen to URL shortening companies out there.
I'm assuming what you're really asking is; why is this news when their peers are venturing into amazing new fields like self-driving cars, immersive VR and AR, AI, chat bots etc., meanwhile, Twitter continues to agonise over how many characters to allow in a tweet (and subsequently presenting the decision as an amazing product update). Valid question!
When a Tweet starts with a @username, the only users who will see it in their timeline (other than the sender and the recipient) are those who follow both the sender and the recipient.
".@someone Hello I want to respond to you but in public!"
Right, this is very much a feature not a bug. I have friends who do corporate customer service through Twitter and the feed would be a disaster if every response or "@" to someone was in the main stream of tweets.
It still shows up if two people you follow are @ing each other, which is a great way to jump into the conversation if desired.
I believe I was more commenting on the behavior of the period and @ ".@" to a average user I think the understanding the intention and the ability to quickly pick up this feature/behavorial cue is a toughie.
I feel the opposite. I think this system works well. I find it easy to view a conversation with @replies when I want to. The rest of the time I don't want to see misc conversational tweets. There are more elegant ways to respond too, like "That's a great point @andyfleming".
Much earlier in Twitter's history, there was a setting you could change to either show or hide conversations between people you followed and ones you didn't; they took it away on purpose. Personally I think quoting tweets and responding in there is the best way to reply to something publicly, but regardless, they aren't likely to change the @-reply behavior at this point.
I agree because most people use Twitter where they replace a person's name with @personsname so they get a notification of it. Referring to people should work like this in my opinion. Honestly it should notify you even if an @ wasn't included similar to how hashtags essentially don't matter anymore.
Edit: seems people disagree with me.
You can't create a feature that limits natural parts of speech. It's just simply not a good user experience. For instance let's say I want to talk about how awesome someone is. Or hell I simply want to introduce one person to another. It may be natural for me to say "Person A, I would like you to meet Person B". That's simply not possible with how replies are currently setup so you have to put a character in front or re-word it.
Yes re-wording is viable but why should someone change the way they converse only so their intended audience can reach them? That is not a good user experience.
What Twitter needs to do is allow you to send a message out to everyone, even if it starts with a user reference, like it used to be. The rub is changing the way conversations work. Conversations are frustrating as hell on Twitter. They need to rework them so that it doesn't rely on an @user but instead thread them. There is a difference between regular messages and a threaded one.
A threaded conversation could also make it easier to link to different conversations people have. Right now it's just jumbled into one huge, stupid pile of crap that's not easy to sort through.
> Honestly it should notify you even if an @ wasn't included similar to how hashtags essentially don't matter anymore.
One problem with that is that dozens of people have identical names. The @name works because it's a unique identifier... though people still sometimes send tweets to the wrong person.
I feel like the way they expect this to be done now is by retweeting with a comment added. Though yes there is a case in the middle still supported by the "." technique and it is less than idea. I suppose you can't fix everything.
