Twitter Changes Will Let You Retweet Yourself, Exclude Mentions From Character Limit

[Lizzy Finnegan]

Twitter Changes Will Let You Retweet Yourself, Exclude Mentions From Character Limit

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Have you ever tweeted something you thought was clever, but no one paid attention to it? Well, Twitter is letting you retweet yourself now.

In a recent blog post [https://blog.twitter.com/express-even-more-in-140-characters], Twitter outlined some of the changes coming to the way that you tweet. Media attachments, such as photos, polls, and quote tweets, will no longer count towards your character limit, nor will mentions (@ names). In addition, Twitter is letting you retweet and quote tweet yourself now. The reason for that is explained below.

It's not immediately clear when these changes will go into effect, and the only timeframe the post gives is "soon [http://i3.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/000/117/021/enhanced-buzz-28895-1301694293-0.jpg]" and "in the coming months."

Here are all the updates coming:

Replies: When replying to a Tweet, @ names will no longer count toward the 140-character count. This will make having conversations on Twitter easier and more straightforward, no more penny-pinching your words to ensure they reach the whole group.
Media attachments: When you add attachments like photos, GIFs, videos, polls, or Quote Tweets, that media will no longer count as characters within your Tweet. More room for words!
Retweet and Quote Tweet yourself: We'll be enabling the Retweet button on your own Tweets, so you can easily Retweet or Quote Tweet yourself when you want to share a new reflection or feel like a really good one went unnoticed.
Goodbye, .@: These changes will help simplify the rules around Tweets that start with a username. New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That means you'll no longer have to use the ".@" convention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) If you want a reply to be seen by all your followers, you will be able to Retweet it to signal that you intend for it to be viewed more broadly.

The post also teases "plans to help you get even more from your Tweets," and the company says it is "exploring ways to make existing uses easier and enable new ones, all without compromising the unique brevity and speed that make Twitter the best place for live commentary, connections, and conversations."

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[vdrandom]

Gotta love tweeter: create a problem (140 character limit), then implement workarounds for it as features. Maybe, just maybe they should just drop that limit or make it reasonable to begin with?

 

[Arnoxthe1]

Gotta love tweeter: create a problem (140 character limit), then implement workarounds for it as features. Maybe, just maybe they should just drop that limit or make it reasonable to begin with?

As much as I don't like Twitter, the whole point of the thing is to make tweets. Not full essays. You should use Facebook/a blog if you wanna do that.

 

[EndlessSporadic]

Gotta love tweeter: create a problem (140 character limit), then implement workarounds for it as features. Maybe, just maybe they should just drop that limit or make it reasonable to begin with?

As much as I don't like Twitter, the whole point of the thing is to make tweets. Not full essays. You should use Facebook/a blog if you wanna do that.

The character limit also makes it significantly faster to pull mass tweets from a database. The limit ultimately makes the backend faster and more compact since tweets are fixed size in a database. Depending on their implementation it also works around a stack overflow issue.

A lot of people sign up for twitter for the brief posts. Very few people want to read your long essays, and the limit prevents you from spewing your nonsense (note that the use "your" here doesn't necessarily mean "you"). People go to forums or Facebook for that kind of thing. Even then, anything that is actually important can be said in less than 140 characters. Everything else is just padding. For demonstration I'll restrict this post to 140 characters:

Character limits make the backend faster by optimizing database utilization and cause people to be precise and leave out worthless info.
-- 136 characters.

 

[vdrandom]

Yeah, but then you have to implement workarounds for usernames, long uri's and so on. (Which means putting in some additional logic into the backend code to deal with them and making it less efficient that way.) Not to mention that English tends to have shorter words than, for example, Russian, Estonian or German. Guess what, the limit is the same in all languages.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

I only use Twitter to interact with this YouTuber who I am a huge fan of, so more characters equals longer questions.

 

[Level 7 Dragon]

Yeah, but then you have to implement workarounds for usernames, long uri's and so on. (Which means putting in some additional logic into the backend code to deal with them and making it less efficient that way.) Not to mention that English tends to have shorter words than, for example, Russian, Estonian or German. Guess what, the limit is the same in all languages.

Out of curiosity I decided to translate Sporadic's example into Russian

Жесткий лимит на введённые символы помогает оптимизации и стримлайну информации на сервере и в какой-либо динамичной системе."

126 characters, could't even max it out.

 

[Strazdas]

On one side good, the @ mentions got really bad in deeper conversations when you have 6 @ names taking most of your characters.

On the other hand i hate that they make all @ mentions global, if im replying to someone i want only that person to see it, not my global feed.

The character limit also makes it significantly faster to pull mass tweets from a database. The limit ultimately makes the backend faster and more compact since tweets are fixed size in a database. Depending on their implementation it also works around a stack overflow issue.

A lot of people sign up for twitter for the brief posts. Very few people want to read your long essays, and the limit prevents you from spewing your nonsense (note that the use "your" here doesn't necessarily mean "you"). People go to forums or Facebook for that kind of thing. Even then, anything that is actually important can be said in less than 140 characters. Everything else is just padding. For demonstration I'll restrict this post to 140 characters:

Character limits make the backend faster by optimizing database utilization and cause people to be precise and leave out worthless info.
-- 136 characters.

Except heres the problem. The long post and the 136 one has different meanings and the short one lacks information to the point where id be calling it out for bullshit. In fact its impossible to provide any nuance or context on twitter, which is precisely why it is such a crappy enviroment.