Photos, videos, GIFs, polls, quotes no longer count toward your 140 characters

https://twitter.com/twitter/status/777915304261193728

by mattiemass • 10 years ago

84 52 10 years ago

twitter.com

biot• 10 years ago

The title is misleading. Actual text:

"Rolling out now: photos, videos, GIFs, polls, and Quote Tweets no longer count toward your 140 characters."

Otherwise you could post a tweet with 141 URLs separated by 140 spaces, and only the spaces count.

sctb2• 10 years ago

Thanks, we updated the title from “URLs no longer count toward your 140 characters”. Unfortunately since the whole tweet doesn't fit in the title, we'll assume the features are sorted by importance.

LukeB_UK• 10 years ago

The updated title is incorrect. Those features have been part of twitter before this, they just don't count towards the character limit anymore.

dbaupp• 10 years ago

I think it is meant to parse as "[the hidden urls in] (photos, videos, GIFs, polls, and Quote Tweets) no longer count towards your limit", not "photos, videos, GIFs, polls, and (Quote Tweets no longer count towards your limit)", because those first 4 things have existed for a long time on twitter. The original title was only wrong because it is only a limited set of URLs that don't count, but the title implied all do not.

kalms• 10 years ago

Could have saved the Internet from a lot of useless traffic.

agumonkey• 10 years ago

They should have 64c or less days. Just to motivate people to rethink their writing.

zakfu• 10 years ago

https://this-is-my-really-long-tweet-that-gets-around-the-on...

trizic• 10 years ago

Surely it has some hard cap, otherwise I can see this being abused (base64 dumps)

andrewstuart2• 10 years ago

Not sure what the appeal of inline base64 would be, though, over linking to a hosted file. Twitter is about sharing text, and arbitrarily long URLs mean mom and pop can achieve longer tweets by just adding http:// and using dashes.

twic• 10 years ago

Apparently they still count data: URLs towards the limit.

riboflava• 10 years ago

What people actually do is write their long text, put it in an image, and tweet the image.

spikej• 10 years ago

Here's a way to do both: image and multiple tweets http://talltweets.com/

neonnoodle• 10 years ago

I tried that. It doesn't work. The character countdown appears to be letting you put in a long URL, but it rejects the tweet upon posting. Specifically I tried putting the first section of "A Tale of Two Cities" into URL form :-P

dragonbonheur2• 10 years ago

My personal opinion is that Twitter still sticking to 140 characters is stupid. If there is still an argument to be made for emergency services using SMS, I'd like to counter that they could implement an "emergency mode twitter" that reverts back to 140 characters in case there is an emergency and only in regions concerned by and adjacent to the occurence of said emergency.

It's time they bump the character limit up to at least 512 characters.

tedunangst• 10 years ago

Does twitter want more tweets or better tweets?

dragonbonheur2• 10 years ago

Quality over quantity is almost always a more desirable trait.

The real question is: Does Twitter want Weibo or Line to eat their lunch and dinner? Maybe it already happened and they're still asleep at the wheel.

brlewis• 10 years ago

That's my intuition too. I don't think even the makers of twitter expected it to be successful.

But in hindsight, since most usage is consumption, the 140-character limit may actually be a killer feature, even though it irritates content producers. People like sound bites.

mxuribe3• 10 years ago

I politely disagree. The vast majority of tweets are awful in communicating succinctly - even as sound bites. Most tweeters, when challenged with the 140-character wall, lack enough details.

harryh• 10 years ago

This makes sense from the perspective of writers, but I think from the perspective of readers enforcing short tweets makes sense.

anexprogrammer• 10 years ago

Two things.

First emergency services often do use SMS - as it's the last bit of signal to remain usable as they move into marginal areas. Data's first to go, then voice, last texts.

Second SMS never was 140 chars - it's 160 char GSM, or 80 Unicode, and every feature phone, from years before Twitter started, happily handled the GSM multipart SMS standard. I forget the limit, but it's at least 10 parts (I think it's much more - 64 or 128 maybe), so 512 char SMS is already done. In 1990-something.

jpalomaki• 10 years ago

For me the 140 character limit is a bit too little. Trying to squeeze my thoughts requires too much effort.

Even a small increase to for example 200 characters would make a big difference.

justincormack• 10 years ago

It is designed to revive the lost art of editing...

LeoPanthera• 10 years ago

No it's not. It's designed to allow tweets to fit into a 160 char SMS along with the username.

labster2• 10 years ago

Write your tweets in a CJK language instead of one using a Latin character set: it's like getting 3 bytes for the price of one. Twitter is a much nicer platform in Japanese, as it gives the user plenty of space to state a complete thought.

mhurron• 10 years ago

Twitter is that important to you that learning to write Japanese is just a little thing to use the platform?

lcnmrn• 10 years ago

Sublevel has a 640 character limit. It works great for some people while very few reach that limit[1]. Along 480 characters is the perfect limit of characters or 3 SMS messages merged together.

So 200 characters won’t make any difference for Twitter.

[1] https://sublevel.net/re/21971/

wineisfine• 10 years ago

They must have worked years on this "improvement".

ramshorns• 10 years ago

This is similar to the improvement Facebook made when they added a few emotion buttons beside the like button. It's technically a pretty small change, but it affects what is seen as one of the core features of the website.

What's Facebook? Oh yeah, that thing with the like button. What's Twitter? Right, it's that thing with the 140 characters.

They must have spent a long time deciding whether it would be worth disrupting what made them popular in the first place to add a new feature. And in Twitter's case they probably also waited until single SMS messages were no longer really necessary.

ocschwar2• 10 years ago

The Internet was going to be an instrument for elevating discourse.

Twitter turned it into the opposite with the 140 character limitation.

Zikes• 10 years ago

Twitter is not the Internet.

redblacktree2• 10 years ago

In fact, we're on the internet now, on a website that serves as an instrument for elevating discourse with its community standards!

mxuribe3• 10 years ago

@ocschwar probably meant that twitter - being a single though admittedly big actor on the internet - didn't help in raising the level of discussion on the internet...At least that's what i interpreted.

justinlardinois• 10 years ago

Who at any point in the development of the internet ever expressed a goal to elevate discourse?

kazinator2• 10 years ago

What is the meaning of the 140 limit if this and that doesn't count toward it?

A 139 character message plus a 50 character uncounted URL won't pass through SMS. The 140 limit is from SMS. If you're going through SMS, meet the limit. If not, then chuck the limit, or pick another one. There is no way to rationalize any half assing like counting only these kinds of tokens or substrings in the message against a 140 limit but not others.

tclancy• 10 years ago

I suppose anyone still getting Twitter updates will notice the difference when their Danger Hiptop hasn't buzzed for hours.

wodenokoto• 10 years ago

They allow 140 unicode characters, so you are a few years late with that SMS argument.

The limit is there because that is what makes it micro blogging. It might have been invented for a different purpose, but it is a long time ago it was there for that.

kazinator2• 10 years ago

So it wouldn't be micro-blogging if it were .. a 192 character limit?

cpeterso• 10 years ago

I wonder how many systems, within Twitter and third-party API users, were broken by this change. I'm sure the 140 character limit is hardcoded, explicitly or implicitly, for things like buffer sizes or database schemas in tons of software.

choward• 10 years ago

They do have a library that helps limit these types of issues: https://github.com/twitter/twitter-text. However, it doesn't appear to be updated.

smegel• 10 years ago

Must be part of the Grand Vision.

Or just someone tinkering with the controls hoping to avoid a crash.

mxuribe3• 10 years ago

I can respect the cachet that twitter has had throughout the world, and the wonderful, positive things its platform has enabled...But honestly, this kind of improvement is so late in coming. Long ago, they should have raised the character limit...Now, I know some might reply with, "but historically SMS/texting limits to X characters only...". My response to this, is that twitter could have adjusted their platform to gracefully degrade. That is, if users can only tweet messages limited to 140 characters because of limits on their device or limits of their infrastructure of submission, then that should not stop other users - who do not have such limits - from tweeting longer messages. Some might feel my comment has the benefit of hindsight, but actually many, many users have said as much during Twitters early years. So I'm not disclosing anything revolutionary or new.

kennydude• 10 years ago

At least they actually added this into the API this time https://www.hitchhq.com/twitter/activities/upcoming-changes-...

Photos, videos, GIFs, polls, quotes no longer count toward your 140 characters

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