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© Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Twitter's 140 character limit: time to ditch it?
By BARBARA ORTUTAY NEW YORK©2024 GPlusMedia Inc.
8 Comments
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MsDelicious
The writing in tweets gets so codified it becomes a different language for different people.
gogogo
I hope they dont get rid of it, small little moments of text is much easier to read than a paragraph of text.
theeastisred
Just ditch the whole thing. Nobody needs it.
Citizen2012
Indeed.
Fox Sora Winters
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.
Mary Nixon
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.
Raymond Chuang
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.
mistie710
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".