Twitter to upgrade from micro-blogging to milli-blogging with 280 chars Twitter is preparing to double its 140-character limit on tweets to 280 characters. The microblogging site announced Tuesday that it had begun a trial with a "small group" of twits that would allow for twice as many letters, numbers, and symbols to be placed into each individual tweet. Not surprisingly, CEO Jack Dorsey is …
In answer your very valid question about his attention span lasting long enough to read 280 characters, I'd say no it doesn't.
The man is a buffoon, although I do like the 'dotard' description too.
But I'm struggling to see how adding another 140 characters can halve the time it takes to trigger nuclear Armageddon.
Surely (don't call me that) adding more characters will delay the pushing of the Big Red Button as the imbecile will almost certainly fry his brain by trying to comprehend such a lengthy string.
"あほ。"
According to Google Translate that doesn't give much improved efficiency for the word "stupid". However - you can use words from different languages in a western alphabet which embody a cultural concept that otherwise takes several words. "Schadenfreude" is a good one = "pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune".
The whole point of abbreviations in texting is to reduce the letter count by using only consonants - or figures like "8" as syllables - or TLAs. That will give a reduction by a factor ≈ 2.
I think you just have to be a bit more flexible in understanding what was intended by "double the amount of information in one character". In fact, as you point out, the shortest translation of あほ would be "fool", which has twice as many characters in English. That's the sense that's intended.
The CJK languages don't use spaces and many words are only 1 or 2 characters long.
(382 characters)
文字に就き情報の二倍と言う事を掴むため、余裕がもっと必要だと思うけど。実は、君の言う通り「あほ」の一番短い英訳が「fool」に成って、長さは日本語より二倍です。そんな解釈が出る。
日中韓は、間隔も無いし、単語の長さとして、１～２字も多いです。
（122字)
Not quite 2:1, but you can see the point.
SMS did (still does?) have a 140-byte limit because it was piggy-backing on an existing control channel. The standard didn't include UTF-8 support so what happened was that if you used any Unicode char, a flag was set and all the message was sent as UTF-16, thus losing half the space or being twice as expensive.
Twitter has always, AFAIK, supported UTF (I guess UTF-8). The 140-char thing counts actual characters, not bytes.
The thing that makes Twitter stand out (YMMV depending who you follow) is the 140 character limit. To use that effectively you need to be bright, literate, and be able craft a succinct message.
In the hands of intelligent people that encourages some brilliant writing, some sparkling wit, and frequent moments of insight.
There's a lovely moment of quiet pride when you craft a perfect 140 character tweet and see the retweets cascade.
280 characters? SAD!
"The thing that makes Twitter stand out (YMMV depending who you follow) is the 140 character limit."
Yes and it also encourage people to put in one liner pointless tweet for any argument because there's no space left for real facts and scie [you have reached the 140 character limit]
Ok, F*** this. [126 character remaining]
But don't Japanese, Korean, etc. also need twice the number of bits per character as the standard Latin character set to encode them?
Remember the tweet character limit was originally set to allow it to fit into one SMS which allows 140 characters for 8-bit Latin sets, 70 characters if you need to extend up to 16-bits.
I like Twitter and Donald Trump. Obama tweets and everyone is fine - such hipocracy. Hey lefties - if you hate the Donald so much just vote him out in the next election, that's how democracy works. In the meantime shut the f(*&k up. Good on ya' Twitter for mixing it up a bit. Not exactly living in interesting times though....
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