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Twitter will allow some users to post up to 280 characters in a single tweet:
Twitter is experimenting with doubling the number of characters users can include in a single tweet, the company announced on Tuesday.
Some users will be able to write messages with 280 characters, double the normal 140-character limit, as the social media site considers whether to launch the feature more widely.
"This is a small change, but a big move for us. 140 was an arbitrary choice based on the 160 character SMS limit. Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence!" Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wrote in a single tweet — something that would have been impossible before the limit was doubled to 280.
The change should benefit ASCII/Latin-1 users the most:
Character limit is a source of frustration for people tweeting in English, but not, for example, in Japanese, Twitter said. The company said its research shows that 9 percent of all tweets in English hit 140 characters, while only 0.4 percent in Japanese reach the maximum.
Is Twitter throwing things at the wall to try to avoid becoming the next Myspace?
Twitter has been struggling to invigorate user growth and advertising revenue while investors are questioning whether the San Francisco-based company can find a long-term growth path. Twitter reported 328 million active monthly users in the second quarter, unchanged from the previous period. Shares have declined 15 percent in the two months since then, closing at $16.59 Tuesday in New York.
It was already possible for tweets to go over the limit due to the way URLs are counted, and @replies not being counted towards the character limit.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Thursday September 28 2017, @08:38AM (2 children)
"Is Twitter throwing things at the wall to try to avoid becoming the next Myspace?"
Yes.
Twitter was a great idea, but it was just a messaging service. It never needed to have thousands of employees, it never deserved a $billion valuation, it never needed international offices. Had Twitter accepted those limitations, it would have long since been a profitable little cash cow. Certain people's egos got the better of them.
Twitter also should have stayed content neutral. Once they started censoring opinions based on political content, they were no longer a great idea. No one makes you follow someone you disagreed with - there never was any need for censorship - but they did it anyway. Stupid.
Twitter is now a walking corpse, bleeding money. When some competing app gains traction, Twitter will start bleeding users. At this point, their best hope would be for someone to buy them, but I'm not sure who would want them...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Pino P on Thursday September 28 2017, @03:16PM
I thought it was either that or be blocked in countries with a broader definition of hate speech than that in U.S. law. In the United States, the First Amendment limits hate speech to mean a clear incitement to bias-motivated crime (Brandenburg v. Ohio). But in some European countries, it's far broader.
Until some miscreant mentions your username, causing a Tweet full of vitriol to be mixed into your notifications. Or until someone you follow for other reasons likes a hateful Tweet, as Twitter's default "best tweets first" feature recently started treating a like as tantamount to a Retweet.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday September 29 2017, @02:38AM
Jesus Christ, get the fuck over yourself. A real problem to be fixed is to make your horrendous API and documentation less autistic and retarded. An order of magnitude less.
For all the Trump-hate from the Twitter staff, Jack Dorsey sure sound a lot like him -- Making a statement that is sarcastic-sounding and inane but still leaves you scratching your head and wondering if he was really being serious.