This tiny change could completely transform Twitter. My most-maintained professional relationships exist on Twitter, yet my non-public conversations (and the attention I pay to them) have nearly always been forced to other venues due to the DM character limit. In my mind, Twitter is now an equally-good alternative to SMS, FB Messenger, etc. You can bet I'll be DM-ing more and SMS-ing less because of it. Thank you Twitter.
That's an interesting perspective. I don't use Twitter for DMing, but for the services I do use to DM (mostly SMS/iMessage and Facebook) I find that I rarely (if ever) get close to 140 characters. Yet I do find the 140 character limit for public tweets annoying on a regular basis. I realize that's supposedly a fundamental part of Twitter's brand or niche, but I'd much rather see them remove the character limit for public tweets.
They should lift the 140 char limit for conversations (=sequence of alternating tweets that begin with mentions), after the first 2-3 messages. This would allow people to begin engaging intelligent discussions, while leaving the majority of tweets in anyone's timeline small and concise.
I believe that LinkedIn charges you a "conversation token" to send an email, but you get it back if the recipient replies. If we extend that mental model a little, a more conversational Twitter might make it so one could receive 2x the last character limit for every reply for that specific conversation.
I'm certain someone will illustrate with game theory how that system would do weird things in the context of a multi-person interaction.
Thanks! That's interesting too - lifting the public tweet limit would also fundamentally change Twitter. As an author of tweets, I think I'd like it. I think @byuu mentioned it would promote intelligent discourse on important subjects - I agree.
As a reader though, I don't want to lose the high-bandwidth nature of Twitter. The headline thought/status/caption in your stream, with a link to the details hits an information consumption optimum for me.
It's really that first DM in a conversation where I think 140 characters causes me to leave Twitter. Maybe I'm doing it wrong - often trying to stuff salutation + context + question into the first DM. If the convo gets past that, then yeah, 140 is fine.
I guess I just don't "get" twitter, but despite the character limit, I still feel like a high-res screenful of tweets still contains almost no content. The webpage limits tweets to a very narrow column in the middle of the browser window, and there's a ton of fluff at the top and bottom of every tweet. I've never been successful at curating my twitter feed; I follow way fewer people than I'd like to, and still see way too much junk.
Facebook is getting worse about "junk" too, but somehow I see far more content per pixel on Facebook than I do on Twitter.
I'd like to think limiting content to 140 characters would make twitter more information-dense, but it doesn't feel that way in my anecdote.
You can try to use TilePad (http://tilepad.co). It is a Chrome extension that arranges twitter timeline in columns, allows to configure a tweet design, and much more.
A huge portion of tweets in my stream have a hyperlink anyway, so in some sense the "bandwidth" is much more than 140 characters per tweet. I think they could allow longer tweets without compromising much. Perhaps the compose tweet text box could even indicate what is "above the fold," which would be limited to 140 characters.
I tend to agree with you. I don't use Twitter for nearly anything (except reading occasional newsworthy information that other people tweet), but this could easily change that. It's in rare company as a platform that allows both completely private conversations (of arbitrary length) plus has a hugely vibrant community of public commenters.
In my opinion this is a bad precedent. Call it a non sequitur but what if they eventually decide they want to remove the 140-character limit from tweets?
I mean, the thing I liked the most of Twitter was how simple it was, but they have started adding so many things to it (especially GIFs, Twitter Cards and videos that auto-play) that it will eventually be Facebook!
And yes I am very concerned of something like that because Twitter is my social network of choice since 2008 for a reason!
> what if they eventually decide they want to remove the 140-character limit from tweets?
I get that the charm of Twitter to many is brevity.
But it might do wonders for intelligent discourse. Twitter has popularized spelling abortions (u, r, 4, etc), dumbed-down vocabulary and hashtags over substance. It may have been fine when it was just your friends chatting about what was going on during the weekend; but it's especially egregious when it's politicians or scientists trying to condense important subjects into 140-characters, which then get regurgitated on the nightly news. Like we're all a bunch of 14-year olds texting each other. Even worse is when this extreme brevity leads to entirely avoidable misunderstandings.
I think it'd really help if Twitter were based on word count instead of character count (and didn't count articles), so people could at least write like adults. And if you really need more than a sentence or two, then allow for a long-form text box that'd turn into a clickable "More ..." link after the summary message. Those that don't want to read much can simply ignore such links, and unfollow repeat offenders.
Another fun side effect of this character rule: you can say 3-4x as much in a single tweet in Japanese or Chinese as you can in English (example: 象 = elephant, yet is only one character instead of eight.)
>But it might do wonders for intelligent discourse.
I see this thrown around a lot, but I don't think removing the 140 character limit will suddenly make Twitter a bastion of thoughtful and intelligent discourse. Twitter is huge, and the "intelligent" discourse I would expect to grow on Twitter would probably be the same "intelligent" discourse Reddit has had for years.
I still believe the character limit on tweets makes it effective for users of Twitter to consume a lot of content from a wide range of people. To me, the end 140 character limit, would be the beginning of artificially curated streams (like Facebook). 50 140-char tweets from 45 different people likely has very different engagement than 10 500-word tweets from 10 people. At that point, whats the difference between Twitter and Tumblr?
The point was that reasoned, articulate debate is possible (or at least, substantially easier) on sites without character limits such as Facebook (and I'm sure it's happened a few times); not that it'll suddenly be the norm if Twitter removes this artificial barrier. I am somewhat surprised I have to clarify this :/
So, reasoned and articulate debate can happen on Facebook, which has no limits, and Twitter, which does. So reasoned debate isn't really connected to character limit at all - you can be insightful or an asshole in both.
>Twitter has popularized spelling abortions (u, r, 4, etc), dumbed-down vocabulary and hashtags over substance.
I don't see how abbreviations or vocabulary change the substance in any way. The only thing it changes is your mindset, and there is something to be said for adopting one's writing to this effect, but in essence: if you are swayed by someone's tone or style instead of substance then that speaks ill of you, not the speaker.
edit: if you are going to be pedantic about other people's writing: `etc' should be followed by a full stop. ;)
>Even worse is when this extreme brevity leads to entirely avoidable misunderstandings.
This is a serious problem for discourse on twitter though, and people have already taken to working around the 140 character limit such as writing (1/4) and tweeting 4 times, or using twitlonger.
The most frustrating thing to me is people ahve taken to posting screenshots of their press releases that we cannot properly zoom or copy and paste. Thank god for 140 character limit!
Yea, it's a terrible gap in our current technology that there are no other promotional or publishing platforms out there without this limit, that would allow scientists and politicians to finally convey more verbose messages. One day maybe someone will invent one.
Snark aside, I do sympathize. It isn't Twitter's fault that it became so popular that very important people have taken to it to post things that really do not belong on a 140-character-per-message service. I also can't entirely blame the people using Twitter improperly: they need to get a message out to as many people as possible, and far too many only read Twitter; so they can't exactly ignore the platform in principle.
I'm not suggesting Twitter turn into Livejournal and have no limits. I'd just like to see people not get penalized for having a language with bad character-to-word ratios, for spelling out words properly, or for having a richer vocabulary. There has to be a middle-ground between 140 characters and 300KB of text with lots of pictures and video.
And if people really need to go over a reasonable limit, Twitter can streamline the process of writing a blog-post and submitting a t.co link to it. Something people already do anyway, just through other services where Twitter loses the page views (and opportunities for advertising.)
> You can say 3-4x as much in a single tweet in Japanese or Chinese as you can in English (example: 象 = elephant, yet is only one character instead of eight.)
Can you really? I thought the "140 character" restriction was due to the "160 bytes in an SMS" restriction, and therefore using multibyte unicode characters consumed multiple "characters."
Twitter's web UI suggests it's allowed, and I can post 140 象 in one tweet.
In practice, tweets get fragmented into multiple SMS anyway, so while this might have been the aim, it's not the implementation they've ended up with.
Also, while you may wish SMS was Unicode, that's not actually likely.
The number of characters you can fit in one SMS will vary depending on whether you use more than one charset, and what your operator and device support. Most SMS in the US/UK/Aus etc will be sent as 7 bit GSM, allowing for 160 characters. 8 bit allows for 140 and UCS-2 allows for 70. (This is assuming no UDH, i.e. no fragmentation)
I can send fully unicode SMS here in Germany, and while my old phone doesn’t support all the characters, it definitely displays even multibyte characters properly.
They got rid of the SMS-related limitations ages ago, but kept the 140 limit because it was "part of what makes Twitter - Twitter".
It's also why Twitter is really popular in Japan. 140 characters is more than enough to hold actual conversations (even if most statements/responses are typically 12-20 characters and the rest of the space is used for emoji)
I think Twitter's popularity in Japan, despite the fact that 140 characters there can convey a message that's 3-4x larger than in English, is indicative that increasing the English character count to somewhere between 280-560 (or much better, moving to word counts instead) would not be the death sentence for the service that many make it out to be.
Which one might call a "natural experiment" for how increasing the limit would affect English speakers' use of the service. (But I don't think Twitter will do it - the number 140 is so well known, it's basically part of its identity.)
You can try it for yourself. Go to twitter.com and put 象 into the box. The number of remaining characters only goes down by one.
I don't know why that is, because I'm pretty sure you're right that the tweet length limit comes from SMS limits. But these days the 140 limit seems to be in terms of Unicode code points, not bytes.
This suggests the potential demand for a high-quality English-to-Chinese-English plugin for Twitter? If only it were possible to effectively build 3rd party Twitter clients anymore.
If you were going to bypass the character limit, I'd go with using URL encode on your message with a special domain. URLs can be substantially longer (2083 characters), and Twitter is happy to only count that as ~10 characters against your message.
Then to decode it and bypass the 3rd-party client ban, release a Greasemonkey script that grabs a[title*="http://supertweets.example.com/"] and replaces the 'a' element with the URL decoded 'a.title' instead.
Even better, actually register the domain, and have it be a simple script that URL decodes the path and prints it out for you, so that people don't have to install Greasemonkey to see your longer message (but doing so inlines the content.)
But ... don't blame me when Twitter bans you for trying this ;)
> what if they eventually decide they want to remove the 140-character limit from tweets?
Then we can all celebrate the end of an arbitrary and obsolete limitation?
The justifications for the 140-character limit have always been:
1) It was necessary in order to make Twitter-via-SMS work
2) It forces users to create better Tweets by removing the option to be long-winded
Twitter-via-SMS was compelling when the only other way to use the service was their original Web interface, but now that Twitter support is baked into umpty gazillion apps and devices there's no reason to limit the rest of the service just to cater to it. And even if you agree that shorter Tweets are always better Tweets (I would argue that point, but that's another discussion), why does Twitter need to enforce that at the application level? If shorter Tweets are better Tweets, that should be a law that enforces itself as people follow those who keep it short and sweet and unfollow those who don't, no? Why not just let people post what they want to post, and trust the users of Twitter to know what they like?
Why do subreddits (and to some extent this site) have moderators rather than letting people post what they want to post, and trusting them to upvote what they like?
One might argue they shouldn't, but certainly many people see value in it.
A subreddit is a shared resource, and moderation is useful because going based on popular opinion has various flaws, like the fact that the people more likely to vote are also more likely to be crazy.
A Twitter stream isn't a shared resource so that doesn't apply. If a bunch of dickheads come into a subreddit they can really ruin it. But I choose who goes into my Twitter stream, so dickheads can't get in, and if they manage to trick me then I can just remove them.
In essence, on Twitter, each subscriber is moderator of their own little subreddit of one.
True, "dickheads" invading subreddits and upvoting each other, or more generally new people coming in whose preferences may differ from the existing community, is one way the voting algorithm can fail to naturally enforce quality, but it's not the only one. As I see it, most (existing) users of a given subreddit appreciate the improvement in quality that results from moderation, yet when some of the lazier instincts of those same people are pooled by mass low-effort voting, funny or memetic or clickbait or flamebait but ultimately low-quality posts tend to rise. For example, on this site, posts whose titles contain "NSA" and some other keyboards are or were penalized in the ranking, because people here, including many of the most famous users on the site, just love to read and talk about the NSA - which isn't itself bad, but since it's so easy and compelling to instinctively hit the upvote arrow on such posts, it tends to get too common and repetitive, so the algorithm taps (tapped?) the brakes. (At least, that's my interpretation of the reason.) As another example, /r/smashbros is a big subreddit for the Super Smash Bros. competitive community, and it's often happened that the moderators banned X type of posts (comics, non-competitive gifs) because a lot of people were complaining about it and there seemed to be consensus against - but that didn't mean the posts didn't get upvotes. You could chalk that up to a difference between the vocal minority and the many lurkers, but I don't think that's the full story.
Admittedly, I've strayed pretty far from the sort of things that can happen on Twitter. After all, it's not like any feature of the site would discourage me from following 100 people who all constantly post about the NSA, and voting is different from posting. But I think there's a similar general principle when it comes to length, the one important form of "moderation" the site actually has: a user might get annoyed at the overall phenomenon of the length of the posts in their timeline, but it's difficult to exert social pressure on everyone to keep length down, and really easy to feel like one cannot say what one wants in 140 characters, whether or not this is true, if one is not actually forced to make it fit.
Also, the aforementioned general case of splits in the community does apply to Twitter. You can unfollow dickheads, but if lots of popular users are in the subgroup that actually prefers long posts, those users who prefer short ones will have a hard time keeping their streams "clean" without feeling like they're missing out. Of course, if one considers the Internet as a whole, one could say that following long-post users is the equivalent of participating in social websites that allow long posts, but unlike the discrete universes of different sites, or even of different subreddits (in the sense that a given post or comment goes only to a single subreddit), Twitter's network allows, and indeed is designed for, cliques to partially overlap and mix, making it harder to establish different "spaces" with different rules, social customs, culture.
The 140 character limit is a fun design choice, but it's worth noting that it appeals to a very specific kind of demographic. The kind that loves forming an opinion without spending more than 2-3 seconds on the material.
It's fun to think of the amount of flame wars, the amount of out of context quoting, of (purposefully or accidentally) misinterpreted tweets etc which all stem from "the limit".
Actually, scratch that, it's not fun at all. It's a waste of time on the scale of hundreds of millions of people. I squeal whenever I see someone start talking about various serious or interesting issues and their post ends in "[1/19]" or some such. Bloody hell, this isn't the format, and there's always a tweet in there which is a fantastic flamebait... when taken outside of its context.
It was more than a fun design choice. When twitter first launched, smartphone weren't as ubiquitous as they are now. They chose the 140 character limit so that tweets could be sent via SMS.
The 140 character limit is a fun design choice, but it's worth noting that it appeals to a very specific kind of demographic. The kind that loves forming an opinion without spending more than 2-3 seconds on the material.
That's... absolutely not true? It appeals to people who are able to communicate an idea succinctly. I'll agree that composing can be a pain, but I very much enjoy being able to read a feed of short posts. If that limit was removed I can't imagine what a mess the timeline would look like.
I know a lot of people at my university who plain out refuse to use twitter.
Take German, a language where even simple sentences end up being above the limit. Everyone who wants to say long things either ends up posting only medium.com links on twitter, or ends up not using twitter at all.
Take now Chinese, or Japanese, languages with Ideograms, where you can fit a whole word into a single character, like 象.
The limit leads to a completely different demographic depending on language.
I think you make a good point, and then contradict it. "The limit" itself isn't responsible for the flamewars et al; it just attracted the demographic. The demographic itself is inherently prone to the flamewars. If you took the limit away, but kept the userbase, they'd still skim-judge people and speak mostly in epigram.
I disagree. IMO private messages shouldn't have the same limitation, and I think Twitter would actually benefit from carefully increasing public limits in two or three ways:
* Don't count attached images and single links towards the character limit (attaching an image leaves you with less than 140 characters)
* Don't count tweeting directly at someone towards the limit (additional @'s should count)
* Don't count the first hashtag towards it either
These changes would allow you to reply to someone, include the chat's hashtag, and include a single link or image, while still having 140 characters to express an idea. It wouldn't lead to massive clutter or abuse, but it would make public conversations less about the limits and abbreviations, which do hinder readability, and more about the content.
It can get really hard to express anything other than overly simplified, individual concepts in a chat, or reference external links, without eating up a substantial amount of the current character limit.
I disagree, having felt a while that Twitter's user experience was beginning to unnecessarily calcify. It's one thing to remove DM post limits, or (someday I hope) make photos and links a separate part of the tweet object instead of elbowing in on the 140 character limit - but it would be something else entirely to force a Facebook-style ranking algorithm.
As long as they don't force users to adopt their way or the highway with every update, you can keep using Twitter as you like it, while others can forge their own experience.
> As long as they don't force users to adopt their way or the highway with every update, you can keep using Twitter as you like it, while others can forge their own experience.
I think they are going to eventually drop the limit for tweets and rebrand into a mico-blogging platform with a built in user base.. There will still be a character limit probably in the mid hundreds, but it will help them monetize.
I don't think that's likely to be their direction; as another commenter observed, that's largely what Tumblr is, and Tumblr is pretty good at it.
I expect Twitter's monetization efforts to move in the opposite direction, in a sense. Many Twitter users follow many more people than they have followers, which turns it into more of a broadcast medium than an interactive medium. Given that they're firmly committed to advertising as a primary revenue model, I'd expect them to be working furiously on recommendation engines to surface new content: not just users you might want to follow, but specific tweets (and Vines and Periscope videos and etc.). That, in turn, can be applied to native advertising.
I don't use tumblr but someone told me that tubmlr is very similar to what you just described (sans the char limit) - from your point of view, why would twitter do this?
Let's say photos and links were separate attachments. That way you could say just as much without having to compensate for the URL, even if it was condensed.
If they do, I (and I believe at least a dozen other people) will seriously consider terminating my presence on Twitter. I'm mostly a passive user anyway, and the recent (well, 2-3 years time frame) changes, such as moving pictures and "sponsored tweets" have been quite annoying. The forced conciseness of the tweets is the only thing that keeps me from pushing the button.
Now, I know I sound like a grumpy old cat, but when some things change, they eventually end up being nothing like the original. Just compare that with Reddit or Hacker News, for instance. The basic laws (and even visuals, in the case of HN) have been the same for some years now, yet the community is thriving.
I kind of hope they do. I'd like a relatively short limit but 140 is a bad number. It's not optimized for any kind of communication, it's optimized for putting ads in sms messages.
> Call it a non sequitur but what if they eventually decide they want to remove the 140-character limit from tweets?
Arguably, it'd be a great move for Twitter to launch a (possibly Tumblr-esque) blogging platform under an adjacent-but-related brand (e.g. comments on the articles could be tweets). Keep Twitter exactly as it is, but expand Twitter's reach by offering long-form content too.
>what if they eventually decide they want to remove the 140-character limit from tweets
8-part Tweets (or larger) are extremely common. Like it or not, people use Twitter as a blog engine. Making it a less shitty blog engine might be a good thing.
I'm quite sure that this, what you call trivial thing, requires more than a single commit.. Might need some non-trivial data changes in the backend before actually removing the frontend limit.
Finally, so many companies do customer support via Twitter and ask folks to DM them the details and you're limited to describing what help you need in 140-characters.
But the enforced brevity (in the form of a 140-character limit) is probably precisely why this works. Otherwise the same companies would be doing support over email.
Actually, people go onto Twitter to complain because it's a very public forum. It's a terrible shame that in order to get some service now-a-days you have to basically publicly shame them or find some way of getting their CEO's private email.
It's also easier to find a company's twitter handle than the correct support email address (if they even expose one without requiring you to sign into an account or fill out a form).
Is anyone else bothered by the name DM or "direct message"? For the rest of the internet the standard name has been PM for private message or personal message.
When you say "I PM'd you", it's not clear, so, I think, Twitter, by choosing their own term, it uniquely specifies the communication channel, i.e. you can PM via different channels (like Facebook, etc.), but you can DM only via Twitter.
Last winter I built an application called Subtweet that built on top of Twitter's Direct Message service, using Twitter's API as much as I could to reduce overhead. It is bittersweet that Twitter is improving DM as it makes Subtweet more and more unnecessary to users, but I am so happy to have all of these features built right in. I saw this shift coming when Twitter added multi-user DMing so I had already written the post mortem if anyone is interested.
Five or six years ago, I was surprised (and a little annoyed) when someone asked me to shoot him a DM because he never checks his email. So I guess this will make conversation via DM more productive? Or will DMs just become the new email, in terms of the same cognitive burden?
I don't know if this matters to you personally, but the thing about Twitter DMs (and about FB messages, I suppose) is that there is whitelisting by default:
If you aren't following me, I can't spam your inbox.
That is a very substantial difference for many people, and why they will use FB messenger, Twitter, or other services in lieu of mail.
This is true...and on Twitter, I've "whitelisted" a lot of people I am not close enough at all to have them in my phonebook. And with Twitter, you have at least some assurance (in the same way that Airbnb gives you a bit more assurance than Craigslist) that you're contacting your intended person...whereas with email, a search can reveal several emails for a person, nevermind several similarly named people, each with several addresses.
I hate it when people DM me. I never check them, on purpose. Like voicemails on my cell, I've been looking for a way to completely disable that functionality.
Yesterday I was trying to schedule an AMA for a subreddit I'm a part of.. I needed to keep sending pieces of my message over multiple DM's since this limit still existed at the time. Painful.
At the risk of sounding out of touch, was there some reason an email couldn't have been sent? I regularly use DMs on twitter, though when I know a message will be longer I just take it to a medium made for a conversation or longer messages.
Oh, I definitely would've preferred email. I probably could have asked but I didn't think about it. I figured we were already having a brief conversation over DM, we could just continue with that.
Oh, not really trying to brag. It's just a minor league baseball player. Point is scheduling something like that means figuring out best timing for both our schedules, etc.
There are two questions there: what's wrong with email for Twitter and what's wrong with email for users.
The first is easy: they don't control it. Twitter handles are already a broad system of public identities and Twitter wants to double down on that.
The second is harder. The value proposition—if any—comes from letting people stay within a single service. It lowers the barrier to starting a conversation on Twitter since you don't need the song and dance of exchanging emails first. It also helps people keep their public identity consistent, especially for those who (for whatever reason) treat their email address as semi-private.
Is this enough to make people use Twitter messages more? I think so, especially on the first point. If you make something easier, people are more likely to use it. I doubt it will replace email to any great extent, but rather lead to out-of-band conversations that wouldn't have happened otherwise. We'll have to wait and see.
Interesting - you thouch upon one reason why twitter without lenght limits will be different from facebook: an acceptance of pseudonyms and multiple accounts that are actuallly separate.
it doesn't have a monetization strategy and it doesn't rely on a modern single-page web interface. also, it has a low barrier to entry so any old chump can run an email server. these are all bad things now
Those aren't bad things. Those are great things. If you feel that this kind of functionality needs to be added to email, then you're probably making a completely redundant product. Reinventing a shittier, proprietary wheel.
Yay! I do not spend much time on twitter, but my DM discussions almost always involve breaking up a communique into several short messages to get past the character limit. I have a friend who chooses to only contact me via twitter, usually privately, and the limit has been a real nuisance. I am so happy to see this.
"Today’s change is another big step towards making the private side of Twitter even more powerful and fun."
Calling the ability to send arbitrary long messages "powerful", when virtually every other internet messaging service has allowed this for ages, requires some serious marketing reality distortion.
As long as they are changing stuff I'd like to see Twitter move from counting the total number of characters in a @username to having them count instead as only a small fixed number (say 2 characters) in a similar fashion to how URLs no matter how long or short count as 22 characters. This would put all users on an equal footing and could potentially decrease the number of hacking attempts on those accounts with the shortest usernames (which is apparently a problem).
I've always assumed that maintaining the 140 character limit is a marketing decision, and they've long since removed any technical limitations that keeps tweets to 140 characters. Does anyone know if I am correct?
Finally some changes for the better! The charm and success of Twitter is probably partly because it is a dead simple concept. But I still wish they add more new features:
http://piks.nl/wordpress/if-i-were-the-ceo-of-twitter/
Reminded me of MSN Messenger, AIM, Yahoo, ICQ...in 20 years from today I guess we'll have yet another string of service names dominating our signatures and about-me's.
