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Twitter To Stop Counting Photos And Links In 140-Character Limit (bloomberg.com) 91

Posted by BeauHD from the but-who's-counting dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Twitter will stop counting photos and links as part of its 140-character limit for tweets in as soon as two weeks, according to a source familiar with the matter. Right now, links take up 23 characters, even after Twitter automatically shortens them. In January, the Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey said the company was looking for new ways to display text on Twitter, and would experiment based on how people use the service. The company considered raising the limit of characters to as many as 10,000. The reason it abides by a 140-character limit is because it allows for tweets to be sent within a mobile text message, which was a common form of sending tweets back in 2006 when the site debuted. Earlier this month, it was reported Twitter blocked U.S. intelligence agencies from having access to a widely used data mining service it partly owns.
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Twitter To Stop Counting Photos And Links In 140-Character Limit More

Twitter To Stop Counting Photos And Links In 140-Character Limit

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  • Why does this matter? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Can anyone tell me why this matters? I doubt it. Twitter isn't a good place for informed discussion. Plus, it's easy enough to post multiple tweets if something exceeds the 140 character limit. So, why would anyone care about this? Besides, social media is for people who aren't intelligent and don't care about privacy. I'll get modded down to -1 for asking this because Slashdot users don't like answering important questions. But this needs to be asked, and I challenge any of you to give me a real answer rat

    • Can anyone tell me why this matters?

      http://it-gives-you-a-new-way-to-write-really-long-tweets!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Geeky ( 90998 )

        Which people currently seem to do by writing a longer message in an editor or word processor and posting a screenshot. Words fail me when I see those - which is just as well really, I don't think I could do justice to just how stupid that is in 140 characters

        • Alton Brown does that. I loved his Good Eats show and how he brought geekiness to cooking, but seeing answers to questions as photos of sticky notes applied to his computer is just infuriating. It might have been quirky at first, but it means it's impossible to include his tweets in a search.

          • Infuriating? Really?

            Maybe try switching to decaf.

    • The 140 character limit does not matter.
      It is neither sociologically interesting nor technically anything.
      It's like an ugly modern art sculpture that Twitter users trip over while crossing the room.
      As ridiculous and pointless as the phallic sculpture from Clockwork Orange.
      Everyone pretends the sculpture is something to talk about.
      But they're just pretending.
      The bruises they receive from tripping over the 140 character limit are shown off proudly.
      It is a form of sadism, perhaps of slight psychological intere

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )

        The 140 character limit does not matter.

        I think it matters since it forces people to succinctly make a point.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tepples ( 727027 )

          Then why not treat the 140 character Tweet as a "headline" and allow the user to attach a text or Markdown file containing the "body"?

      • What tune does that go to?

    • how about writing all you want in a text editor then taking a screenshot and posting the image of the text, like this http://i.imgur.com/XlgHWZs.jpg [imgur.com]

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by trabby ( 4123953 )
        Information is lost by using images containing text, it isn't searchable, nor can it be copy pasted. and no one is going to bother to OCR it.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by allo ( 1728082 )

          this can be an advantage.

          • Information is lost by using images containing text, it isn't searchable, nor can it be copy pasted.

            this can be an advantage.

            Not for readers who use a speech- or Braille-based screen reader because they are blind or hard of sight. In fact, it can be a liability for those subject to disability discrimination laws.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by allo ( 1728082 )

              And still it can be an advantage, that information is lost to machines. Maybe the blind are collateral damage, maybe the person is just talking shit about the blinds ;-).

              Okay, you're stopping a few people from reading it, but that's your decision. And as said, at least the search engines are kept out, while blind people may have helping (ocr) software to read it.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by tepples ( 727027 )

                [Text transmitted as an image] can be a liability for those subject to disability discrimination laws.

                Maybe the blind are collateral damage

                The Americans with Disabilities Act and foreign counterparts were enacted specifically to prevent businesses from treating the blind as collateral damage.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by allo ( 1728082 )

                  And twitter needs to make sure its users do not post text as images? It's not like twitter would pack text longer than 140 chars into images for its users ...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gfxguy ( 98788 )
          If people are doing it because of the character limit, then it's better to just increase the character limit, but sometimes people do it because they don't want their words altered, or to be taken out of context. Of course, if that's the primary reason, then twitter is probably not the greatest medium.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gfxguy ( 98788 )

      It shouldn't. Twitter is all about short messages that get the point across quickly... and it wasn't designed to be some sort of socio-political platform for people to "raise awareness" or convey essays; it was all about telling your friends that you were headed to Moe's Tavern at 8:00 tonight, or there's a party at Jane's house, so swing by!

      I work in television, and social media has become a huge deal. We format our graphics to fit the limits of of what people can do. For twitter, I can tell you that if

    • Can anyone tell me why this matters? I doubt it. Twitter isn't a good place for informed discussion. Plus, it's easy enough to post multiple tweets if something exceeds the 140 character limit. So, why would anyone care about this? Besides, social media is for people who aren't intelligent and don't care about privacy. I'll get modded down to -1 for asking this because Slashdot users don't like answering important questions. But this needs to be asked, and I challenge any of you to give me a real answer rather than insulting me. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone here is up to the challenge.

      And that's what I call a person holding self-fulfilling prophesies. You are not interested in a conversation. You are interested in a confrontation. If you doubt the audience is willing or capable to give you an intelligent answer to something you seem to have set your mind already, then why bother if not just still some emotional e-shit?

      This is like those people who go to dating sites putting adds that read "am I attractive" or "are there any good men left, I doubt it."

      Feel free to take this post as pr

    • If you don't care then ignore the story.
      If enough people ignore such stories then the editors will not show them anymore as they will not bring traffic.

    • No real reason, AFAICT. Twitter stopped being a "micro blog" the minute they went beyond text and maybe a single URL. You see people posting pictures of text sometimes, sheesh! IMHO, they should just concentrate on thumb-nailing all the non-text media down to a reasonable size so that it doesn't hog resources unless I actually click on it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by swalve ( 1980968 )
      Because the whole point of twitter was that brevity is a restriction that forces creativity. And also it used to be SMS only and that's the limit on SMS.

  • I think this is a good decision (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Theovon ( 109752 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2016 @06:49AM (#52126521)

    These days, people don’t know how to he informative and concise. Twitter forces people to think about what they write. However, 140 characters can also be overly restrictive sometimes, which is why people have wanted to increase the character limit. But if they increase it too much, Twitter will just turn into another blogging service. I think that simple exempting images and links is a good compromise.

  • Earlier this month, it was reported Twitter blocked U.S. intelligence agencies from having access to a widely used data mining service it partly owns.

    What's that got to do with the 140 character limit?

    • Well, #nsareadingallmytweets was taking up a few of the 140-character limit.....

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dwye ( 1127395 )

      Vladimir Putin demanded that it be included in the story, just to rub in how trustworthy he is, on pain of polonium poisoning by the FSB/KGB/NKVD/Cheka/Okrana.

  • Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

  • Twitter is toying with the thing that sets it apart. The obvious next change would be to not count hashtags against the limit. And then on top of that they will start changing the character limit to find some sort of sweet spot.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by g01d4 ( 888748 )

      changing the character limit to find some sort of sweet spot

      I think the sweet spot is the maximum tolerable size of a broadcast message competing, as it were, with others. Like a smartphone, too small leaves out too much and too large is too unwieldy.

  • Twitter is a PR hype machine (Score:3, Interesting)

    by monkeyxpress ( 4016725 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2016 @07:41AM (#52126659)

    The only time I hear about twitter it is when a media outlet writes a story about someone, usually someone else who works in the media, tweeting something that they think is important. From this I conclude that twitter is just a bunch of media and PR people sending messages between themselves so they can report those messages as 'news' to the general public when there is nothing else going on in the world.

    • Sometimes somebody says something that offends people and then they get publicly shamed! But otherwise, yes, I assume it is run by PR agents.

  • Is Twitter making a profit yet, or is it still the posterboy for Bubble 2.0

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gfxguy ( 98788 )
      Who cares? Why would anyone that wants privacy distribute their terrorist plans on Twitter? And yes, for the record, people have tweeted dumb things and gotten visited by FBI and CIA.
  • I always wondered what the reason was for the 140 character limit when my phone's SMS limit was 160.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by _merlin ( 160982 )

      IS-95 CDMA phones (common in US, used to a lesser extent in other places like Australia) had a 140-character limit for SMS. GSM and its derivatives (e.g. UMTS) have a 140-byte limit, which can be used for 160 7-bit GSM alphabet characters, 160 8-bit characters, or 70 UCS2 characters.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      Simple. They sms you, what somebody wrote:

      "@[18charsusername][space][message]"

  • Big mistake (Score:4, Interesting)

    by OpenSourced ( 323149 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2016 @08:20AM (#52126809) Journal

    I have observed a tendency in all business, after having a huge success with something, to try to change it, and change again, till they kill it. I suppose it's a consequence of the human inability for just doing nothing, and letting things be.

    I don't use Twitter, never have, never seen the point. But I know about Twitter The reason being that tweets are cited in all kind of media. The reason being that tweets force people to be concise, and produce text-bites for the media to consume. Forcing people to be concise is something you don't get with 10000 characters. So I suppose I'll cut myself short, too...

    • I have observed a tendency in all business, after having a huge success with something, to try to change it, and change again, till they kill it. I suppose it's a consequence of the human inability for just doing nothing, and letting things be.

      Of course, on the flip side, you can also fail by not changing with the times. For example, Blackberry. They were the top of the smartphone heap at one point. The landscape began changing and they insisted that they didn't need to change because they were Blackberr

  • i certainly hope they aren't saying you can include as many links/images per tweet as you want or idiots will start putting several links in every tweet. the upside is that this could do away with link indirection which is just masking your true destination.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      There already is a limit to 4 images. For links its more complicated now, i guess.

      And of course apps will break, at least their layout.

  • Slashdot should do this.

  • Who gives a fuck about the character limit on Twitter? Is it really that slow of a news day?
  • It's been a while since I've been on twitter, but it used to drive me up the wall that username tags and retweets all counted against my character count. Also, what's stopping us from flooding the tweets with garbage long URL's?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      RT is native since a long time, so you can substract the 3 "RT " chars. And Usernames ... are just part of a message, aren't they?

      • No, the username should be a preface to the message. If somebody's username is @MrShinyBananaPants2005LolPoop, that's a substantial amount of wasted characters before you even get to your actual message.

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