Tweetstorms and the 140c tweet limit: proposing a compromise for the sanity of all, in a 2min read


Tweetstorms annoy me. Not (so much) the content, but the format. Twitter ought to be making what we write easier to read—like when they stitched together @replies—not harder. I could go on about what’s wrong with tweetstorms, but it’s been discussed, e.g., http://socialtimes.com/tweetstorms-abusive_b148394 and http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/why-twitters-newest-tweetstormtm-trend-must-be-stopped. Instead, I decided to propose a short, simple solution, a workable compromise between Twitter’s desire to maintain the 140c tweet limit and our desire to more easily read & write Twitter content. And, it’ll help Twitter be more Facebook-like, without being Facebook.

I should have vetted this idea first with those who would know how feasible it is to implement, but since I’ve been only a consumer of Medium I thought I’d take the opportunity to try publishing on this platform to evaluate it for myself, regardless of whether it’s a good—or previously-proposed—idea or not, so here goes…

I’m calling it the Multitweet™ and I think it can be implemented with a minimal impact to Twitter’s user interface and infrastructure, and with a real positive impact on the Twitter user’s experience. Here’s how it would work:

  1. Extend the tweet-box textbox to accept input of some multiple of 140, less than 1500, let’s say 980 as an example.
  2. When users tweet greater than the traditional 140c, Twitter accepts it as a multitweet.
  3. Twitter merely stores the multitweet internally as a series of 140c tweets, but recognizes them as parts of the same multitweet—much in the same way Twitter is able to recognize an official retweet versus a manual “RT.”
  4. Broadcast all parts of a multitweet.
  5. Decorate and format appropriately. I have a simple idea about this, but Twitter employs many user interface experts and I’m sure they can come up with something better than I (I consulted Grammar Girl on “than I versus me,” http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/than-i-versus-than-me).

There are small issues to work out, e.g., how to automatically delimit the 140c parts of the of multitweet, how to deal with SMS, but these are not hard. Even SMS services split messages >160c into multiple texts. And, sure, while 980c still isn’t going to satisy those who suffer logaria, e.g., https://twitter.com/pmarca, let the <.0001% have their multitweetstorms.™

Why not just bite the bullet and extend the limit? OK, but to what? I still believe most tweets ought to be limited to 140c, so this proposal offers a way to try to preserve and encourage the limit, while giving us a way to say just a little more when we need to, short of publishing an entire piece on Medium—even though this was rather easy and enjoyable to do, except for a few confusing parts for a first-timer—and tweeting a link to it.

I’d be surprised if there aren’t proposals or a solution in the works. On the other hand, I’m still waiting for “Edit Tweet” and “Modified Retweet,” both of which can be mapped to equivalent features when posting on Facebook.

And, let’s face it, if Twitter’s going to hope to get more mainstream and put an end to being confusing for a lot of people initially, the first thing it’s going to have to do is figure out a way to extend the 140c limit, because nobody new to Twitter “get’s that” in today’s mobile messaging world.

Just because Jack is a man of few words, doesn’t mean we all are. ☺