Tag Archives: Twitter

Further defense of 140 characters

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Last fall, when rumors began swirling that Twitter was looking at increasing the 140 character limit on tweets, I wrote a defense of the 140 character constraint. Last week, Re/Code and others reported that the limit change may come in March and that it could be as large as 10,000 characters.

Everything I wrote back in October still holds true. 140 characters, now that SMS is no longer a primary method of interacting with Twitter, is probably to small. But 10,000 is too large. The first four paragraphs of this post are 1,244 characters. Can you imagine a timeline full of that (or more)?

It’s not just “oh noes! They are changing a thing!”, which is a common reaction whenever Facebook changes anything. Twitter has made a lot of changes that I think are great: retweets (yes, kids, retweets used to be a manual process that often required editing the tweet in order to be able to fit “MT @name” in front of it), quoted tweets, embedded images, polls (even though there’s a lot to be improved on there), and 10k character direct messages.

In this case, the short limit is what makes Twitter. As my friend Zachary Baiel said “The medium is the message. The character limit of Twitter defines itself. Otherwise, it’s a stream of blogs.”

Twitter emphasized four characteristics in its IPO filing (thanks to Karen Demerly for bringing this to my attention):

  • Public
  • Real Time
  • Conversational
  • Distributed

10,000 characters does not seem very real time (it takes a while to type that out and longer to read a lot of them) and certainly not conversational (perhaps more a series of short speeches). There’s been some talk of the UI presenting a “read more” kind of option, and as a co-maintainer of a Twitter client, I’m inclined to resist having to make changes to my application.

But more than just laziness, I think 10k is actively harmful. Whenever a new feature is announced, the biggest complaint I see is “why aren’t you addressing abuse instead?” I get it, abuse is a hard subject to deal with, particularly on an unmoderated medium such as Twitter. One way that abuse happens is that abusers get their followers to dogpile the mentions of the target. Imagine how many targets you could include in 10,000 characters.

More innocuously (even though I find it super annoying), is the phenomenon of “I took a picture of some weather, let me tag all of the meteorologists in my market so that they’ll see it any maybe retweet me or put it on the news broadcast.” Those people will certainly make use of the extra characters, but it will add nothing to the conversation, only make it worse.

I get it, Twitter stock is plummeting. (Full disclosure: I own a few shares and expect to get quite the tax write-off from them.) There’s a lot of pressure to improve revenue, user engagement, and (most importantly to the people applying the pressure) the stock price. But this change will just make the user experience worse, and that doesn’t seem to be a reasonable way for Twitter to turn itself around.

I’m hoping that 10,000 is just a trial balloon. Nobody seems committed to making that the final number, so hopefully when the feature lands, it’s more reasonable. Or not. Will I stop using Twitter if the character limit changes to 10,000? Not right away. Maybe I will at some point, though.

By the way, this entire post (including this line), checks in at 3,398 characters.

Reporting severe weather via social media

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It feels weird writing a post about sever weather in mid-December, but here we are. Over the weekend, storm chaser Dick McGowan tried to report a tornado to the NWS office in Amarillo, Texas. His report was dismissed with “There is no storm where you are located. This is NOT a valid report.” The only problem was that there was a tornado.

Weather Twitter was awash in discussion of the exchange on Saturday night. A lot of it was critical, but some was cautionary. The latter is where I want to focus. If you follow me on Twitter, it will not surprise you to hear that I’m a big fan of social media. And I think it’s been beneficial to severe weather operations. Not only does it make public reporting easier, but it allows forecasters to directly reach the public with visually-rich information in a way not previously possible.

But social media has limitations, too. Facebook’s algorithms make it nearly useless for disseminating time-sensitive information (e.g. warnings), and the selective filtering means that a large portion of the audience won’t get the message anyway. Twitter is much better for real-time posting, but is severely constrained by the 140 character limit.  In both cases, NWS meteorologists are experts on weather, not social media (though there are efforts to improve social media training for forecasters), and there’s not necessarily going to be someone keeping a close eye on incoming social media.

I don’t know all of the details of Saturday night’s event. From one picture I saw, it looked like the storm in question looked pretty weak on radar. There were also several possible places Dick could have been looking and it didn’t look he made which direction he was looking clear. At the root, this is a failure to communicate.

As I said above, I’m a big fan of social media. If I need to get in touch with someone, social media is my first choice. I frequently make low-priority weather reports to the NWS via Twitter. For high-priority reports (basically anything that meets severe criteria or that presents an immediate threat to life), I still prefer to make a phone call. Phone calls are less parallelizable, but they’re lower-latency and higher-bandwidth than Tweets. The ability for a forecaster to ask for a clarification and get an answer quickly is critical.

If you do make a severe weather report via Twitter, I strongly encourage enabling location on the Tweet. An accurate location can make a big difference. As with all miscommunications, we must strive to be clear in how we talk to others, particularly in textual form.

In defense of 140 characters

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Re/Code reported Tuesday on rumors that Twitter is planning to change its hallmark 140-character limit. It appears that there are no firm plans, but there are a variety of ways this could change. The rise of the smartphone has diminished the importance of being able to fit a tweet into a single SMS message (at least in developed Western countries).

I’ve certainly been frustrated by the limit  at times. There have been thoughts left untwote because I couldn’t find a way to squeeze them into 140 characters. But I’ve also learned how to make my thoughts more concise. The need to edit forces me to consider what I’m saying and reduces the rash responses that I often give people in my head.

Is 140 characters the magic number? Probably not, but the immediacy that tweets provide probably offsets value that longer tweets would add. At some point, Twitter becomes Tumblr, and there’s already a Tumblr.

The experts say Twitter is looking to improve user and revenue numbers. I’m probably wrong, but I don’t see these changes being all that beneficial to either of those. Curbing abusive behavior and making quality content easier to find would go a lot further.

In the meantime, I’ll keep taking up whatever space Twitter gives me and hope it’s not too much.

Student speech rights

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To continue the legal theme from a few days ago (with the addition of some “old news is so exciting!”), a high school in Kansas suspended the senior class president for comments he made on Twitter. What did he say? ““Heights U” is equivalent to WSU’s football team“. WSU’s football team doesn’t exist. That’s it. For that, the school deemed his initial tweet and responses were disruptive to the school.

It’s not clear to me if the Heights High School is acting in accordance with legal precedent (their decision is certainly unjust, but that’s another matter). The Supreme Court has affirmed and re-affirmed restrictions on the free speech rights of students. Bethel School District v. Fraser, Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, and Morse v. Frederick have all served to limit what students can say.

In Tinker v. Des Moines, the Court protected non-disruptive political speech, with the disruption being the critical factor. In Bethel, Hazelwood, and Morse the speech in question was part of a school-sanctioned activity even if the activity was not on school grounds (as in Morse). It would be a great stretch to consider Mr. Teague’s Twitter account to be a school-sanctioned activity, as it appears to be his personal account. To my knowledge, no Supreme Court ruling has ever addressed a school’s ability to restrict speech that occurs outside of school events.

Arguably, the concept of in loco parentis could be used to support the ability of schools to respond to behavior that happens outside the school. I don’t agree with this, but it would be interesting to see how this argument played out in the courts. In the meantime, I expect that this may end up being discussed in court rooms for years to come. If no suit is filed, it should at least be used as an exercise in high school government classes across the country.

On September 11: my memories and the role of technology in never forgetting

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I really hadn’t intended to write a 9/11 post here. It doesn’t seem to fit with whatever this blog is supposed to be. But it’s all over the newspaper and it’s all over Twitter, and I’m sure if I turned on the TV I’d see 9/11 all over again. Even the Sunday comics were more touching than comic, so I guess it’s fitting that I share my thoughts.

The morning of September 11, 2001 dawned. I’m not sure how it dawned, because I was still sound asleep in my room at Purdue’s Cary Quadrangle. My alarm went off at some point to tell me to wake up and go to class, and I ignored it. A few weeks into my collegiate career, I had already decided that 8:30 chemistry lectures were optional. I didn’t wake up again until my roommate Carl came back from his morning classes. “Dude. One of the World Trade Center towers collapsed,” he told me. “Fuck off, Carl,” was my reply. I was barely awake, and I was convinced that Carl was bullshitting me.

So he turned on the TV.

I don’t remember what time it was. I don’t even remember where in the timeline it happened. All I know is that for the rest of the day, Carl and I sat on Lucy the Couch and watched CNN. We couldn’t look away. I don’t even think I left to go to the restroom until about 2:00 that afternoon. And that’s when I first started to realize the magnitude of what had happened. There were about 40 guys on my end of the floor, mostly freshmen and sophomores, and it was rarely a quiet place. Without air conditioning, we all kept our doors open to get air flow. But as I walked down the hall to the bathroom, I realized that all I could hear was the sound of everyone’s televisions.

That night, Carl and I went to go get dinner. I don’t think we went with friends as we normally did. It was more of a “we haven’t eaten all day and there’s no new news, let’s go grab a bite real quick” decision. The Cary dining hall, one of the most popular eateries in all of University Residences, was subdued. The kids of middle-Eastern decent looked nervous and ate quietly and away from everyone else. Were they afraid of misplaced retribution? To my relief, I never heard of such an occurrence at Purdue. The same could not be said for other college campuses.

Life returned to normal fairly quickly for us. No classes were cancelled. Homework was still there. Most of us, being generally Midwesterners, had few ties to New York City. While the news was horrific, it didn’t impact our daily lives. And here we are 10 years later. The political climate is soured. Our troops are still in Afghanistan. Laws passed to aid the fight against terrorism have been used largely to combat domestic drug crimes. And yet we maintain this promise to never forget.

And so I think about the other events that we, as a nation, have sworn to remember. The Alamo, the Maine, Pearl Harbor. Each of these events were a rallying cry for a moment in time, a common thought that drove the people toward a goal. But as time has passed, we seem to remember them less. The events are still recalled, but with no more clarity than a history lesson. The personal stories are fading, and continue to do so as a an ever smaller percentage of our population has first-hand stories to tell.

A decade on, the September 11 attacks are still remembered. Will they be in 2101? Certainly the history and political science texts will have much to say. But what will our national conscious say? Does the fact that the victims were civilians instead of military personnel make this more enduring? Will the digital age help preserve our stories? Or will time simply wash this event from our collective thoughts?

As a technology enthusiast, I am intrigued by the role that technology may play in our shared history. Although social media didn’t really exist in 2001, it now provides an opportunity for shared reflection. People are able to interconnect in ways that were not possible on December 7, 1951. We’ve seen the role Twitter and Facebook can play in driving revolution in oppressive regimes. What will our Tweets, our statuses, and our blog posts do to ensure we truly never forget?

mmtter: a front end for TTYtter

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If you know much about my Twitter habits, you know I’m a bit fan of Cameron Kaiser’s TTYtter. I’ve written in the past about using it to follow event streams, but one limitation was that it was hard to consistently tweet event messages. For example, when you send a tweet from a UStream feed, it includes the feed’s hashtag and a URL to the stream. This is a great way to lure in viewers.

Since TTYtter has easy support for posting messages from the command line, I figured it would be an easy task to write a wrapper that would automatically include the relevant information so that I wouldn’t have to copy/paste every time. The result is mmtter, a small Perl script to pass the arguments to TTYtter. So far, it just checks to make sure the tweet is short enough and then mashes the text onto the end. Since it blindly grabs the arguments from the shell, you have to carefully escape special characters. Future “enhancements” will include the ability to prepend a string. In the meantime, you can get it from GitHub: http://www.github.com/funnelfiasco/mmtter

While you’re enjoying my minutes of hard work, be sure to watch the Mario Marathon and donate using the happy little button on the right-hand side of this page.

Is Twitter just a crippled version of IRC?

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Back in May, Karsten Wade posted “microblog format/interaction is a crippled, radically transparent form of . Otherwise, seems to serve same purposes.”  I don’t know if that’s his own conclusion or if he was quoting someone else, but I disagree either way.  The other evening, I had a related discussion with a friend.  Her take was that Twitter is a less-featureful version of Facebook status updates.  I don’t believe that either, but it seems to highlight a problem with Twitter: it’s utility isn’t readily apparent.

Twitter easily supports one-to-one and one-to-many interaction.  Many-to-many is possible, but requires some searching and/or client configuration.  That makes it a rather poor replacement for IRC.  IRC is also more real-time than Twitter is necessarily.  Although Twitter is often used for real-time events, it doesn’t have to be.  The big difference between IRC and Twitter is that IRC is self-contained.  This is a point I made several times during the Mario Marathon, when people in chat felt they were being ignored.  IRC can be very active, but no one outside the channel will notice.  With Twitter, the message gets spread each time someone posts.  If a topic begins to trend, that can pull in even more participants.

There’s a better case for saying Twitter is just like pulling the status updates out of Facebook.  Several people I know post Facebook status updates with their Twitter accounts, so it seems reasonable.  I’d agree that they are mostly the same, but there are a few differences.  The primary difference is that Facebook more easily allows threaded discussion, whereas a tweet stands alone.  Neither way is necessarily better; in certain circumstances one is preferable over another.  There’s also the lack of passive support.  In Facebook, you can “like” a status with impunity.  On Twitter, to express support, you must re-tweet and therefore own the statement.

To me, there’s a clear use for Twitter.  That’s not the case for many people, and until they can figure out a use, they simply won’t use it.

My TTYtter configuration

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It’s been many months since I found out about TTYtter, a command line Twitter client written in Perl.  Though some users might bemoan the lack of a snazzy graphical interface, it is that very lack which appeals to me.  TTYtter places only a very tiny load on system resources, which means my Twitter addiction won’t get in the way of running VMs to test various configurations and procedures.  Being command-line based, I can run it in a screen session which means that I can resume my Twittering from wherever I happen to be and not have to re-configure my client.

I don’t claim to be a TTYtter expert, but I thought I’d share my own configuration for other newbs.  TTYtter looks in $HOME/.ttytterrc by default, and here’s my default configuration:

#Check to see if I'm running the current version
vcheck=1
# What hash tags do I care about?
track='#Purdue #OSMacTalk #MarioMarathon'
# Colors, etc are good!
ansi=1
# I'm dumb. Prompt me before a tweet posts
verify=1
# Use some readline magic
readline=1
# Check for mentions from people I don't follow
mentions=1

Of course, there are certain times that the default configuration isn’t what I want.  When I was reading tweets in rapid-fire succession during the Mario Marathon, I didn’t want non-Mario tweets to get in the way, so I used a separate configuration file:

# Don't log in and burn up my rate limit
anonymous=1
# Find tweets related to the marathon
track=#MarioMarathon "Mario Marathon"
# Don't show my normal timeline
notimeline=1
# Colors, etc are awesome!
ansi=1
# Only update when I say so. This keeps the tweet I'm in the middle of reading
#      from being scrolled right off my screen
synch

There are a lot of other ways that TTYtter can be used, and I’m sure @doctorlinguist will tell me all of the ways I’m doing things wrong, but if you’re in the market for a new, multi-platform Twitter client, you should give this one a try.

Twitter made me feel important

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I know it’s hard to imagine Twitter serving a useful purpose, but it did on Monday.  Not only did it make me feel useful, but I was able to pass along information.  Allow me to set the scene.  Purdue University announced last month the need for a $30 million cut in the budget to address a “structural deficit.”  Recently, the governor announced a cut of $150 million in higher education funding for the remainder of the biennium.  Because of cuts and RIFs earlier this year, there are a lot of questions among the faculty and staff about what these cuts might bring.  In order to address some of the concerns, President France Cordova held an open forum on Monday, joined by Provost Randy Woodson and Executive Vice President and Treasurer Al Diaz.

The South Ballroom in the Purdue Memorial Union was standing-room-only, and there were still many people who could not attend.  In order to keep my colleagues (and other followers who are interested in the state of Purdue’s finances), I live-tweeted during the 45-minute discussion.  As I expected, it was rather difficult to try to summarize important points in 140 characters or less while listening for the next useful piece of information.  What I didn’t expect was how fun it was to do it.  It was fun trying to meet the challenge, and I was encouraged by the fact that I got a few follow-up questions from followers (and amazingly, no one complained).  I’m not about to quit my job to become a full-time Twitter reporter, but I do hope I get a chance to do this again.