Twitter expands beyond 140 characters

Twitter has announced another tweak to its text-message system that will give users greater space to send messages alongside pictures. The change, which will be rolled out over the next few months according to a blog post by the company, will retain the company's 140-character text limit but not count links to photos or people …

[sysconfig]

They should allow more text

The move is a logical one as the service has gradually evolved as a way to send pictures and videos to people, and has expanded beyond a primarily one-to-one sending service.

It has also evolved to a service where people increasingly resort to rendering longer texts into images and just post them, because 140 characters is often just a little bit too short to get a point across.

[djstardust]

Re: They should allow more text

Agreed. I barely tweet anything (compared to my postings on other social media or forums) as the 140 character limit runs out before I can say what I was going to say.

Taking names out will help but only marginally.

The other thing is that companies use Twitter as a contact point but normally they just fob you off on to other channels so there's no point tweeting them in the first place.

[JDX]

Re: They should allow more text

140 is quite a lot if you actually get 140 for the text. If you find you need substantially more it might just be that Twitter isn't the best platform.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: They should allow more text

Yes, vapid comments should be limitless.

[RegGuy1]

$ echo "It's a shame Twitter restricts me to 140 characters," \

> "because that's not even close to being enough for me" \

> "to truly express how much of a cu"|wc -c

140

$

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would a company that has lost 2bn in the last 5 years still be trading?

Could it be anything to do with politicians and their silly tweets that keep ending up in the media?

Could it be useful to have such a service where people make mistakes and post statements they later regret?

I don't know the answers to these questions? I do know that twitter is like Facebook and full of self-obsessed half wits who would have trouble tying shoelaces on slippers (in that they would try)

[JDX]

It's a hugely popular platform and has genuinely changed the way humans communicate (whether for good or for bad) so is very powerful. However just because something is valuable doesn't automatically make it profitable.

We were expecting Facebook to flop commercially but they seem to have turned it around after some wobbles. It does seem Twitter is struggling and it is rather confusing this is the case considering just how big a deal it is.

[Jan Hargreaves]

"Geniunely changed how humans communicate?"

Is that rock I live under really that big? You do realise that actual geniune twitter users is just a fraction of the world's population. I've heard of some idiots actually saying hashtag in a conversation in a pub - followed by most sane people leaving the building.

[Francis Boyle]

Well, the actual percentage of humans who used the enigma machine was pretty small too.

[breakfast]

It does seem that their ideal monetisation strategy would be to get media companies to pay to reuse twitter content for lazy journo stories, which is to say most of them. A small fee with a bit of that income to Twitter, a bit to the creators and you have a path to something viable albeit nothing close to their market valuation.

[Ian 55]

How did it manage to lose $2bn in the first place?

It's not as if they have hordes of staff closing down bots and abusers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Urban hipster churnalists unite! You have nothing to lose but your tweets

Time to nationalise twitter.

[Tromos]

Re: Urban hipster churnalists unite! You have nothing to lose but your tweets

What's the point of nationalising Twitter? It seems to be perfectly capable of losing money hand-over-fist without that unnecessary step.

[404]

Hmmm, that will help a bit

imo, twitter has become somewhat of an echo chamber, with folks on both sides following other folks with the same opinions. Seriously, how many times does '________ is the Debbil!' have to be retweeted? That gets irritating and I've pretty much checked out of politics until it's time to do the dirty deed and vote for the ones less likely to kill us all.

Now that being said, *targeted* tweeting can be very effective to get a point across. Whether good or bad, a good old school newsgroup flame, name, and shame (or praise from time to time), can get results with creative hashtagging and mentions to potentially interested parties. I'm currently having a lovely time trolling... baiting... having a public conversation with several local politicians and various government agencies (yeah wtf El Reg about that anyway?).

Moving on, I really don't see how Twitter can monetize unless they start charging for a organization's account/presence on twitter - make them pay for their targeted advertising etc. I mean twitter is both big and small at the same time, essentially it's a public messaging client with a much larger reach across the world. Difficult.

[Barry Rueger]

Please, don't break it.

I have no brilliant solution to making it profitable. Maybe it's impossible.

Twitter is something that I use a lot.

The brevity is one of its best features, and encourages smart and concise writing.

The timeliness is unparallelled. Certainly regular media is usually well behind Twitter.

Like any social media, the value of Twitter depends very much on who you choose to follow.

I don't think I ever have more than a dozen names on that list, and they are all high value, low traffic users.

What I expect will happen is that Twitter will do what Facebook did: take what is a fairly simple and useful platform and bury it under a pile of gimmicks, games, and bottom feeder commerce.

At that point the people who make Twitter valuable will be long gone.

[ralphh]

Concise

I enjoy working out to fit a movie review into 140 characters.

[andrewj]

Gosh how world-shakingly exciting /sarc. Twaddle's problem is that the vast majority of people not using it are not interested in using it.

Someone stick a fork in them. Maybe you'll deflate the rest of the Sillycon Valley bubble at the same time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said!

I ask people why they use Twatter. Most of their replies indicate that they want to be part of the herd/flock.

They get an adrenaline rush from the instant gratification of sending something that their 'followers' (cult members) will lap up with glee.

That makes it as far as I'm concerned a drug just like Nicotine, Caffiene and dope.

Just say no because it is addictive and then you get the DT's when your disciples don't respond to the crap you send to the world. How many social media users are being treated for depression?

Just say no and don't use it. Get a life in the real world.

[DaddyHoggy]

I like Twitter, for the most part, as a writer, it's good to keep track of other writers and meet up via a #hashtag discussion once a week or month with other writers and, more importantly, potential readers.

When four or five people were involved in a discussion there was almost no room for the payload of the tweet, so this will help enormously.

Of course, I presume the spammers will quickly realise that if names don't count, they can spam everyone with a single tweet and a 140 char message (or link).

You get out of Twitter what you put into it.

[Anonymous Coward]

[sent pictures] ... would leave them with virtually no room to actually say anything.

one can only hope.

[I_am_Chris]

Bad press

Twitter gets bad press for being full of trolls and fire being superficial. Although I don't disagree there are those elements, it isn't unique on the internet.

I use Twitter a lot for keeping in touch with others in my field of science and what they are up to or thinking about. The traditional scientific publishing model is broken and social media is more attuned to how we want to communicate our work. Quickly, easily, to our peers and the wider community.

Hashtags are an extremely efficient way to follow conferences that you are not able to attend in person.

Conciseness is a strength of Twitter, breaking that will make it fail.

[Paul Kinsler]

Re: [twitter] keeping in touch with others in my field of science

For myself, I can't see it as useful in any sense beyond the superficial. OK, so I suppose some of the shorter emails that I send might be twitterable. But 140 chars is way to short for me to have any kind of technical conversation, even given that a technical conversation is likely to include mathematics of some kind.

Also:

I can see how you might do PR for science via twitter, that would work well. But science PR isn't the science itself - even a one page press release on a result isn't science, so however apt the analogy you might use in your tweet (or pr) still isn't a fair representation. Which is not to say the twitterpr is worthless, just that it's a very distinct thing to the necessarily detailed science itself.

Science publishing might be broken to some extent, but I fail to see how any valid scientific article can be usefully replicated on twitter or social media - it seems to me that whatever the failings of journal-style articles, whether in traditional journals or not, twitter is not a replacement. It seems to me you have conflated the actual scientific content with the pr/publicity you would like to achieve for that content.

The conference thing is interesting. For myself, I just read/skim the timetable from the conference site and look up the authors or work independently. Twitter/hashtags might give a sense of 'buzz' around some particularly noteworthy result, which I guess might be helpful. But my projects tend to run over timescales that incline me to prefer to avoid obvious bandwagons and seek out still interesting but less trodden paths. I skim a much wider range of article/conference output than is ever likely to even microtrend on twitter.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not evolving

All linked data (URIs etc, not just some of "their own" URIs such as videos, images) need to be excluded from counts, unless you use a URL shortener, giving a link to some URIs, would leave hardly any characters left to comment why you have posted a link.

With so many competing communications options, the enforced brevity of tweets that was OK back in the day of SMS on low tech phones has become it's Achilles Heel in the heavy data use smartphone era: Many of us do not have the time to waste in jumping through hoops to squeeze anything other than quite simple concepts / comments into the character restriction, so for anything non trivial different social media tools are more useful than Twitter

I'm sure I'm not alone in only bothering to look at Twitter occasionally to follow some breaking news that is of interest to me, but do not use it on a regular basis.

The lack of control over message deluge is a fault of their own making, plenty of apps Twitter have killed that allowed users decent control over what tweets they saw as a priority, how they were organized etc.. But such user friendly functionality seems anathema to Twitter as it would stop the "impact" of their "promoted content"

AC as have to use Twitter for work purposes occasionally (far more work use than personal use, most of comments above relate to why personal use low, but some make work use more of a pain too)

[Anonymous Coward]

Good ...

... Now all they have to do is get rid of OAuth.

[Yugguy]

I'm neither for nor against.

Twitter is pretty much meaningless to me.

[jms222]

It's obvious we're now going to get loads of texty image tweets

[Anonymous Coward]

@I @don't @use @Twitter, @but @by @excluding @names @from @the @limit, @couldn't @you @just @add @at @to @everything @to @override @the @length @limit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Automated bots? No! Really?

Retweet if you want to add a guaranteed 1million follows. #rt #breaktheinternet #retweet

[Anonymous Coward]

Alas poor Twitter I remember it well

The last days beckon....

[paulej72]

How many characters do you need to say "I just took a shit and now my toilet's clogged".

[NotWorkAdmin]

TL;DR

Sorry, couldn't resist.

[Chris Evans]

Rearranging the deck chairs!

I do wish them well but it sounds like a classic case of rearranging the deck chairs whilst the ship is sinking!