Breaking the 140 barrier
June 24th, 2009 | by jz | Published in Future of the Internet, twitter | 8 Comments
Twitter only allows 140 characters per tweet. The founders explain that they expected interconnection with mobile phone text messaging — SMS — from the start, and that it could be expensive to have longer tweets broken into mutiple messages when people pay per SMS. As Dom Sagolla explains:
Messages longer than 160 characters (the common SMS carrier limit) were split into multiple texts and delivered (somewhat) sequentially. There were other bugs, and a mounting SMS bill. The team decided to place a limit on the number of characters that would go out via SMS for each post. They settled on 140, in order to leave room for the username and the colon in front of the message.
Of course, 140 characters is now part of the lore and essence of Twitter. It’s as sacrosanct as McDonald’s having two arches (despite starting with only one) or a Swiss Army knife folding up. (An April Fool’s joke had the company appearing to offer “Twitter Premium” with 160 characters and 50,000 instant followers.)
But there could be good reason to stretch the limit — or allow for a slightly more nuanced set of data behind a tweet — and not just because 140 characters might cut off key information (to be sure, an Onion-ey link) and have only half a thought re-tweeted before it’s fully completed. In fact, the “retweet” — expressed as “RT @[source] [source's original tweet]” — is a great case study on why. As danah boyd et al explain, retweeting is one of several “behavioral conventions” arising from Twitter users themselves. Twitter itself does not have a special “RT” functionality; it’s just two letters that many people have come to use to say that they’re repeating something they saw elsewhere — and giving attribution for it.
With the 140 character limit, though, the “RT” and attribution have to fit too. An original tweet that’s already near the limit will have to be shortened for it to work. And if someone retweets further, the cycle continues. Danah & Co. have some great examples in their draft of ways in which that retweeting can inadvertently distort or even negate the original message.
Twitter has already shown a willingness to adopt users’ conventions. The use of @___ at the beginning of a tweet to communicate with a user became so common that it made sense for Twitter to put a special link on each user’s home Twitter page to view “@replies” from others. For retweeting, Twitter could choose not to count RT @___ against the 140 character limit. That could cause some tweets to be truncated when forwarded to SMS, or divided into two messages, which was an original reason why the limit was adopted. But that might be worth it at this point. Or, Twitter could start implementing metadata for tweets. Already it records a timestamp and source for a tweet (since people can inject tweets into the system in so many different ways, not just at twitter.com.) Retweets could become part of that metadata, not necessarily fully transmitted as part of the full message itself. That way, the 140 character limit could be maintained, but people could still follow the genealogy of an idea, right back to its source — just the way that the “in-reply-to” link on twitter.com lets someone unravel an entire conversation with just a click. And being able to lengthen a tweet in special circumstances could, if applied to URLs, also help avoid the need for the risky phenomenon of URL shorteners. [Update 10 August 2009: tr.im just announced it is folding; shortened links will work for awhile but not forever.]
Twitter is a foundational technology. By that I don’t mean it’s (necessarily) revolutionary, just that it’s a building block. Its open APIs allow it to be baked into all sorts of other services, and like other foundational technologies — say, PC operating systems, or Internet protocol — it’s evolving comparatively slowly. Even MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia, hasn’t changed all that quickly. Too much is built on top of it, both technologically and in users’ practices, to change it hastily. So that’s one reason just to let it sit as is. But by giving a little more breathing space for attribution — to let people more readily build on others’ ideas through retweeting — Twitter could help assure an even wider spectrum of use, even if its founders didn’t happen to think it could be used so comprehensively or seriously.
June 24th, 2009 at 10:33 pm (#)
JZ,
Last time I checked, the Twitter API does not limit to 140 characters, but the different Twitter apps behave differently when you break the limit.
But busting past the limit is only the tip of the iceberg for what should be done with status/messaging communications:
see: http://civilities.net/Semantic_Social_Media_Construction
Jon
June 24th, 2009 at 11:01 pm (#)
I see where you’re going with your idea; communication is less effective when stilted, repurposed and RT’d. As you note, Twitter has a hard stop at 140 characters. That limit may seem somewhat capricious, but it is, I believe, its killer feature.
Limiting people to 140 characters tends to compel them to condense their thoughts—sometimes to a density of a neutron star. Obviously, this type of communication is easily stretched to the breaking point, especially when discussing deep, important topics. However, it does encourage people to just throw something out there rather than cower and lurk. It limits risk while creating a parameter that people can easily comprehend. Say something in 140 chars or less. I can do that; you can do that, evidently even cats and dogs can do that. Simple.
It’s what good teachers do in order to get you to think: provide you with an endpoint. Speaking as a designer and a writer, I understand that knowing where the box ends allows you to think outside it. Constraints = creativity.
So, let’s not turn Twitter into something it’s not, but rather, as you say, let’s appreciate it as the building block it is. Entire industries may and have spring up around it. But let’s keep the original around without modification so that the small-voiced may continue to speak.
@carlacasilli
June 25th, 2009 at 1:13 pm (#)
JZ,
If I can summarize the work I did with Semantic Social Media Construction to make it *much* simpler.
There are basically two types of tweets/status-messages:
Temporal and Conversational.
The temporal ones are often of the nature of someone announcing that they are somewhere, or are going somewhere, or are reporting exclusive news. These are the sorts of things that should fit under 140 characters and should well go to the mobile phones.
The conversational ones are everything else: responses, retweets, URL finds, ongoing live-tweeting… there is no real reason to broadcast these over SMS to followers, so the 140-limit is unnecessarily constrictive.
Twitter needs to figure this out, because Facebook generally has mastered the conversational messages.
Jon
June 26th, 2009 at 7:18 am (#)
Twitter itself does have a special “RT” functionality; it’s just two letters that many people have come to use to say that they’re repeating something they saw elsewhere — and giving attribution for it.
I think you mean Twitter *doesn’t* have a retweet function…
June 26th, 2009 at 8:08 am (#)
[...] boyd’s view on the communication phenomena of retweeting and Jonathan Zittrain’s thoughts on technical 140 characters barriers on Twitter. Having in mind that retweeting process is one of the conversation practices on Twitter, the [...]
June 26th, 2009 at 11:15 am (#)
Very important points here. The URL-shortening issue alone I think demands special attention from The Twitterlords, for it makes the interwebs too dependent on go-betweens. Twitter would remain appropriately minimal if it were to take a “140 characters + a link” approach.
June 27th, 2009 at 8:59 am (#)
JZ,
Keep it as it is, short and focused.
Han
June 29th, 2009 at 3:04 pm (#)
I agree with your thoughts of adding meta-data for retweets, building them into the application makes sense at this point and would free us to make more of them – which is one of the greatest intents of the service: to share ideas. I don’t consider that a very major change and not a true breaking of the 140 char limit (which I like – if you have more to say, write a blog and post the link ;)).
As far as the URL shorteners, I believe that they will be used regardless of char limits, on Twitter or else wher. Furthermore, many of the issues with them can (and should) be addressed by the shortening services or through browsers – preview panes, etc.