We cite tweets quite often now.
Wondering who (among us TNCR participants) do any of the following:
1. Send out tweets
2. “Follow” others on Twitter
3. Read tweets using the Twitter app
4. Read tweets as SMS

The original Twitter was very restrictive: 140 character limit because it’s meant to be replicated over SMS (legacy cell phone text messaging system) that has a 160 character limit, Twitter “reserved” 20 bytes for its own use.

Once people moved off legacy SMS, once phones acquired the capability to concatenate fragmented SMS messages, the 160 character limit ceased to be functional. Twitter recognized that and doubled its message size to 280 characters. Even that is silly because there is no good reason any modern app cannot handle much larger (even arbitrarily large) message sizes ...

... wait, I was going rant a bit on why Twitter still impose a pretty small per message character limit if most people have moved onto the app or modern phone software that can deal with much larger message sizes. Then I realize that the small message is still needed to protected Twitter!s own message replication infrastructure — Twitter makes and sends billions of copies of messages each day, “small message size” limit is still needed to keep the load manageable at this scale.

Still, even though Twitter doubled the message size limit, there is a publication ( https://techcrunch.com/2018/10...on-length-of-tweets/ ) claiming that the average tweet shortened in length anyway, from 34 characters per tweet on average with 9% of tweets hitting the 140 character limit (when Twitter had 140 character limit) to 33 characters per tweet on average with only 1% of tweets hitting the original 140 characters limit (after Twitter raised the limit to 280 character).

Be it by preference, through the establishment of conventions, or skill, people write even shorter tweets now anyway.

No

I’ve been active on Twitter since 2008. I don’t actually compose tweets often (maybe a couple times a week), but I do cross post my instagram feed over there using IFTTT. It’s a huge resource in the education community, which is why I joined in the first place. I find the character limit restrictive sometimes during replies. It’s hard to have a good conversation with those limits. But the recent move to “threads” and services like unroll.me has made it less annoying.

I follow a lot of twitter posters but haven’t posted anything myself in a very long time.

There are lots of linguists in Twitter.

I joined it as a reader only. Though I’ve replied to people a handful of times.

Twitter is how I keep in touch with prominent higher education researchers. Increasingly, I'm finding Twitter a very useful networking site. Because of Twitter, I have new coauthors, I see webinars I never would have known about otherwise, and I give them to audiences I would not have had but for ...

I joined twitter a long time ago and started posting piano pictures - in fact, I think I used those pictures as a host site for many here... Then I stopped for a longer time when I shifted to Instagram.

I just checked back in again after the BLM protests to get a real-time idea of where the protests and hot-spots were around town.

quote:

I see webinars I never would have known about otherwise

Oh yeah, this!!

I need to start posting....

When I originally made my twitter account, I think I intended as a place to share info and articles of interest for students. But I quickly found that all I was doing was posting links to other things, and so I stopped. That was a long time ago.

I keep thinking one of these days I need to start posting regularly, but we'll see.

I also recently made an IG page (at this point I can't remember why), and I posted maybe three piano pics and that was the end of it. :P

I don't tweet.

I don't read tweets.


Just one more thing to have to follow.

And I hate trump with a passion I didn't realize I had.

He tweets.

I don't.

I've never sent a tweet. I've gone on occasionally - usually when someone's post or FB thing links to twitter. I don't understand how to use it.

I set up an account, but that's as far as it went.

I use it.
Short posts require people to be clear and not ramble.
I put some of the best tweets (IMO) on Facebook.
I like the format. Sifting through the carp is easier.
I don't post much myself.

David Frum tweets ...

A fifteen tweet thread = op-ed.

I do 1, 2, and 3. Not 4.

I mostly read, post occasionally to share my business stuff.

Conversation/discussion is difficult because the threads are weird and branching. Someone snarked at me because I said something that had already been said upthread, but it wasn’t in the thread as presented to me. I give up. No more discussion.

Still, good for in the moment info, like “Is there a riot downtown tonight? Again?”

I followed the Arab Spring on Twitter. News agencies kept it ahead of other sources.

Twitter also allows you to make fun of Congress-critters (Republican in this case) who say stupid sh!t:

The Founders Would NEVER submit to vaccination ...

Hmmm. George Washington inoculated the troops ...