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Twitter's 140 character limit: time to ditch it?

8 Comments
By BARBARA ORTUTAY

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8 Comments
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The writing in tweets gets so codified it becomes a different language for different people.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

I hope they dont get rid of it, small little moments of text is much easier to read than a paragraph of text.

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Just ditch the whole thing. Nobody needs it.

-1 ( +1 / -2 )

Just ditch the whole thing. Nobody needs it.

Indeed.

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Instead of ditching the limit completely, they could try increasing it to say, 500 characters. That'd allow longer posts without paving the way for a barrage of essay-length tweets. I'd consider going back to Twitter with a bigger limit/no limit at all, but currently it's too restrictive.

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What about just expanding the character limit to like 200 or 240. It's still relatively short, but gives a little more space. That would help me be able to be a bit more grammatically correct and spell words out, but still get it out in a short message.

Japanese tweeters have it easier because their words can usually be expressed in only 1 to 3 characters, whereas languages besides maybe the various Chinese languages need many other languages that use the Roman alphabet or other such alphabets/syllabries (like Cyrillic or Korean) need more room to express the same ideas.

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I believe the new limit for each tweet should be 384 characters for Latin, Cyrillic and Korean hangul characters and 256 for Chinese and Japanese. I wouldn't be surprised that Twitter announces this change within the next six months. 384 characters in English is enough to eliminate most usage of often unreadable abbreviations.

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No, I still believe in the whole premise of the 140 character limit. It stops the over-verbose from flooding readers with huge wads of text. It's unlikely, for example, to see the admonishment "tl;dr" on Twitter as it stands.

To go beyond that...

Have you ever heard of Usenet?

tl;dr, for those that aren't up on it, is short for "too long; didn't read".

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