By We, I Mean You

This week I ditched a guy I was following on Twitter because he stopped respecting the 140-character limit. I suspect he won’t be the last, either.

“He managed to get more than 140 characters in?” some may wonder breathlessly. “How’d he do that? Can I do that too?”

No, he didn’t, although people are already producing workarounds to do just that. (I’m not going to point you to them, though.) What he did was turn off his brain. Meaning he couldn’t formulate his thought eloquently, elegantly or even briefly, so he didn’t even try. Halfway through the second sentence, the tweet ended mid-word with an ellipse (…) and a link.

I clicked the link and found what I expected – he’d simply scraped content from his blog and slapped it into Twitter, backing out enough characters for a tiny URL and three little dots. He went to the effort of copying context, pasting into the tweet, creating the URL, pasting it into the tweet, and deleting the characters to make it all fit – when it would have been faster, more effective and less insulting to his readers if he’d just thought of 140 thought-provoking words to make them actually want to click that link.

That’s right – I think it’s insulting. I guess some “pointless babble” is just too big and important for 140 characters?

Everyone knows how the 140-character limit for Twitter came about, right? It’s related to the 160-character limit established for text messaging. To avoid having to split text messages into multiple parts, the creators of Twitter capped the length of a tweet at 140 characters, keeping the extra 20 for the user’s unique address.

(That 160-character limit for text messaging, by the way, was established by a German guy named Friedhelm Hillebrand, who through a process of typing out random sentences and questions found that nearly every one came in under 160 characters. “This is perfectly sufficient,” he recalled thinking during that epiphany back in 1985. Gotta love engineers.)

Of course, any artist, inventor or visionary will tell you that restrictions, while initially stifling, often produce some of the most creative solutions. The tweet is being hailed by some as the modern haiku; one enterprising guy has already published a book on writing short-form (I suspect the book is longer than you think).

In this case of the guy I dumped, I think he just got intellectually lazy. For an example of clueless, check out Ad Age – an organization reporting daily on how to use Twitter.  Here’s a tweet from today:

Despite Creative Firepower, Olympics Ad Push Doesn’t Sway Chicagoans: CHICAGO (AdAge.com) — For all the creativ.. http://bit.ly/wF4e0

Note how it peters out right there at the “creativ…” That’s because no one could be bothered to modify the “slug” – the front end of an article that journalists used to send out via something called a “wire service” (Google it, youngsters). They’re thinking like a print outlet. Some copy editor had to write a headline to fit within a designated character limit. The same discipline is required to express information as a tweet. Heck, if it’s a good headline, you may just have your tweet right there. But they didn’t even think of that.

If I wanted an RSS feed from Ad Age, I’d subscribe to one. That’s not what I want on Twitter. Deliver the message, but respect the reader. I think 140 characters is “perfectly sufficient.”