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Twitter today announced the launch of a new feature that's designed to allow people to tweet with their voice, sending voice-based messages instead of text.

voicetweets1.jpg
Twitter is where you go to talk about what's happening. Over the years, photos, videos, gifs, and extra characters have allowed you to add your own flair and personality to your conversations. But sometimes 280 characters aren't enough and some conversational nuances are lost in translation. So starting today, we're testing a new feature that will add a more human touch to the way we use Twitter - your very own voice.
Voice tweets can be created by opening up the tweet composer and tapping the new wavelengths icon. From there, a screen opens with a user's Twitter icon, which can be tapped to begin a recording.

Twitter users can capture up to 140 seconds of audio, but continuous recording is possible and longer audio will create multiple voice tweets.

voicetweets2.jpg

Voice tweets will appear on the Twitter timeline just like other tweets. Listening to a voice tweet can be done by tapping on the image, and on iOS, playback starts in an audio player that's docked at the bottom of the timeline users can continue to scroll through Twitter.

Twitter is testing voice tweets with a limited number of people on Twitter for iOS at the current time, but the company says that in the coming weeks, everyone on iOS should be able to send voice tweets.

Article Link: Twitter Rolls Out New Voice Tweets Feature
 
Does Twitter still have the 140char limit?

140 seconds is a long time. That's almost 2 1/2 minutes, and a lot can be said in that amount of time. Or not... this is Twitter, after all. The place where nuanced discussion goes to die.
 
Does Twitter still have the 140char limit?

140 seconds is a long time. That's almost 2 1/2 minutes, and a lot can be said in that amount of time. Or not... this is Twitter, after all. The place where nuanced discussion goes to die.
They boosted it to 280 chars. And 140 seconds is REALLY long. Radio commercials are frequently 15 seconds or 30 seconds. A 60 second commercial can seem interminable. 140 seconds would be like an infomercial.
 
"140 seconds" LOL. Twitter in 2020 is a bastard of Twitter at inception.
The 140 character limit was because Twitter was originally supposed to be a service accessed mostly via SMS, not an app, and SMS at the time limited messages to 140 characters.

It wasn't because 140 characters was magically the exact right number of characters.

But... yeah, 140 seconds is stupidly long. The longest to read tweet that could be posted in 140 characters in English (ignoring the possibility of just 140 W's in a row) would be probably saying the word "aioli" 23 times (that'd be 138 characters). Takes about a second per time you say it, so 23 seconds would be plenty. Bump it to 30 characters to be more generous.

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The real reason for this change is probably so they can have audio ads. For every audio tweet you listen to, they can subject you to an audio ad in-between.
 
They boosted it to 280 chars. And 140 seconds is REALLY long. Radio commercials are frequently 15 seconds or 30 seconds. A 60 second commercial can seem interminable. 140 seconds would be like an infomercial.
Yea there was a Medicare one the other night for two minutes, and it definitely seemed like a long time.
 
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