Twitter Officially Removes 140-Character Limit From Direct Messages

[Benjamin Frost]

Tweets are too short.

k

 

[Benjamin Frost]

Finally, we can now tweet from Mary Poppins:

Oh!
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!
Say it and wild animals would not seem so ferocious!

Of course you can say it backwards, which is Suoicodilaipxecitsiligarfilacrepus!

 

[jsmith189]

Are you talking about the DM character limit or a general character limit for just tweeting something?

DMs. I still get the 140 character limit.

 

[FieldingMellish]

It's great news for legions of online Twitter mobs for whom Twitter's message limitation curtailed their invective. Better for flaming, shaming, bullying and browbeating whomever the target is at the moment.

 

[C DM]

It's great news for legions of online Twitter mobs for whom Twitter's message limitation curtailed their invective. Better for flaming, shaming, bullying and browbeating whomever the target is at the moment.

Such things are done in private where no one else can see and where the receipeint has easy control over it all and can limit and block it all easily if needed/wanted?

 

[Billberryjuice]

Phew, I was worried that they were going to do it unofficially. Thanks MR!

 

[Alenore]

Tweets are too short. It makes using Twitter annoying. The fact that they could ever limit direct messages to that boggles my mind though. Same with snapchat... They go to all that hassle to implement money transfer and video chatting but the features are so over "simplified" that they become a hassle to use.

You could have quoted Apple in that list.

 

[navaira]

This must have taken years of hard work and immense technical expertise. Congratulations Twitter!

 

[Parasprite]

The weird thing about the 140 character limit is that the amount of information you can fit in depends on which language and writing system you use. For instance Chinese tweets can be far more detailed than English ones.

This is basically why I only tweet using Gregg shorthand.

 

[BellsWhistles]

Also depends on writing skills. Some must learn brevity: expanded vocabulary, elimination of redundant words and meaningless prepositions. One phrase I've noticed lately is "high rate of speed" as though they haven't heard the word velocity before.

Was "fast" removed from our lexicon?

 

[kds1]

So that it will just become some sort of blog/Facebook type of thing? The whole point of it is that it's not that.

It shouldn't be unlimited, but it needs to be made longer. Some people have very long twitter handles, and the name takes up too much space when you reply or mention them. 160 or 180 would be better.

 

[kds1]

The whole point of Twitter is that it isn't Facebook or a blog?

... that actually kind of sums up the pointlessness of Twitter nicely.

It's actually not pointless. I really enjoy twitter, and find it useful. How you are using it affects what you get out of it.

 

[C DM]

It shouldn't be unlimited, but it needs to be made longer. Some people have very long twitter handles, and the name takes up too much space when you reply or mention them. 160 or 180 would be better.

Perhaps usernames just need to be handled better in some way.

 

[Analog Kid]

Twitter started out as a service to broadcast status messages only, hence the limit; since that's no longer true, there's little reason to adhere so strictly to the original model--though odd the only thing that makes the social network distinctive is its limitations, but they've grown so popular that it's not that important anymore to be distinctive in any way.

What's made it popular is the restriction. It's a curb on people who think they have more to say than they do and who are too lazy to make their words meaningful.

Also depends on writing skills. Some must learn brevity: expanded vocabulary, elimination of redundant words and meaningless prepositions. One phrase I've noticed lately is "high rate of speed" as though they haven't heard the word velocity before.

Velocity is speed and direction. Speed itself is a rate (distance per time). Most likely whoever uses the phrase doesn't understand that the "rate of" part is redundant and thinks more words sounds more smart-- or they mean some changing aspect of speed such as directionless acceleration (speed per time).

This is basically why I only tweet using Gregg shorthand.

The first improvement I'd make to Gregg shorthand is to remove the unnecessary third 'g'...

It shouldn't be unlimited, but it needs to be made longer. Some people have very long twitter handles, and the name takes up too much space when you reply or mention them. 160 or 180 would be better.

Or make handles count as a single character.

 

[ttarakanoff]

Great! . . . now do that for regular tweets.

Twitter will never do this, otherwise it will lost it's main feature.
Fortunately, you can always use Twishort for regular tweets.
We had problem before, because you can not use services like Twishort for DMs.
Now everything is much better, finally.