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Harold Mansfield
05-18-2016, 07:01 PM
It hasn't been officially confirmed, but many outlets are reporting it. I hope it's true. We've only been waiting 5 years for them to get off of the pot on this.


Twitter Inc. is making a major shift in how it counts characters in Tweets, giving users more freedom to compose longer messages.

The social media company will soon stop counting photos and links as part of its 140-character limit for messages, according to a person familiar with the matter. The change could happen in the next two weeks, said the person who asked not to be named because the decision isn’t yet public. Links currently take up 23 characters (https://support.twitter.com/articles/78124), even after Twitter automatically shortens them. The company declined to comment.



Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit - Bloomberg (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-16/twitter-to-stop-counting-photos-and-links-in-140-character-limit)

For those of you who use Twitter, is this welcomed news?

vangogh
05-18-2016, 07:37 PM
I saw they were doing this. It is about time. In fact it's time for them to drop the whole 140 character limit for everything.

However, I can't say it'll get me to use Twitter again. I stopped because every time I looked at the stream of people I was following or even lists of people I had culled down, the tweets were mostly pointless or someone trying to sell me something. About the only thing I find useful with Twitter is breaking news. When something happens in the world it seems to hit Twitter first. Then again, I can't think of too many things that I need to know instantly. I can usually wait the minute or two for the rest of the internet to find the story and repeat it endless.

Harold Mansfield
05-18-2016, 07:57 PM
Now if they would stop screwing developers with this insane token system, maybe we'll see some decent new Twitter clients and plug ins.

Brian Altenhofel
05-18-2016, 11:30 PM
I really only use Twitter as a datasource for information. When I do post something there, 140 characters is more than enough already.


Now if they would stop screwing developers with this insane token system, maybe we'll see some decent new Twitter clients and plug ins.

I can see how the token system can negatively impact apps (multi-user) when the developers haven't done proper planning, but I can't see how it would negatively impact plugins.

nealrm
05-19-2016, 09:15 AM
While I do use twitter for my business, I still don't understand why people like it. It seems like a step backward. Why not just call the person and have an actual conversation?

Harold Mansfield
05-19-2016, 11:31 AM
I can see how the token system can negatively impact apps (multi-user) when the developers haven't done proper planning, but I can't see how it would negatively impact plugins.

Because your usage tokens, as a developer, max out. A plug in would have multiple users just like an app. And they keep changing the API and playing around with releasing it, not releasing it, and it's the same thing over and over again.

Jack Dorsey says it's a new day and he wants a better relationship with developers, but to date they haven't done anything to change.

To me it's obvious why, because they want complete control of the platform and if there are any tools to be created, they want to create them so that they don't lose any ad reach. I wish they would just say that.

Brian Altenhofel
05-19-2016, 03:37 PM
While I do use twitter for my business, I still don't understand why people like it. It seems like a step backward. Why not just call the person and have an actual conversation?

If I call someone, they are either really special to me or emergency services.

As I said earlier, I use Twitter as a datasource for information. It's like a firehose. I have a few segmented groups that I do skim through at various points during the day (mostly other developers, business people, and politics), but for the most part it goes through a filter that sorts through it for things I might be interested in later and things I need to be alerted of immediately.




Because your usage tokens, as a developer, max out. A plug in would have multiple users just like an app

The tokens are 100K users per client application, and only for applications that are trying to replicate the Twitter experience. Even then, you can get approval to 1M under the normal terms of use and more than 1M under a direct agreement.

A plug-in is generally single-user and would be a extreme edge case to exceed 100K users per installation. If a plug-in is burning through tokens, then they are using the API wrong. If a plug-in is being rate-limited, then they aren't queuing their requests properly.

Harold Mansfield
05-19-2016, 04:13 PM
The tokens are 100K users per client application, and only for applications that are trying to replicate the Twitter experience. Even then, you can get approval to 1M under the normal terms of use and more than 1M under a direct agreement.

A plug-in is generally single-user and would be a extreme edge case to exceed 100K users per installation. If a plug-in is burning through tokens, then they are using the API wrong. If a plug-in is being rate-limited, then they aren't queuing their requests properly.

This is not what developers are saying and have been saying for a while now. It's easy for a popular plug in to exceed 100k downloads. Yes they say you can get approval but the complaint is that very few people get them. Consequently there are only a few Twitter clients left, and barely any plug ins anymore that actually work.

This has been going on for a while now with developers just saying screw it and not building for Twitter anymore.
I've been following this for a long time, and it sounds simple when you post up the talking points, but that is not how it's working in reality.
The CEO has addressed the issues that I'm referencing and how they've screwed or chased away developers. They've admitted it.

They just haven't done anything to change it yet.

Brian Altenhofel
05-19-2016, 04:31 PM
It's easy for a popular plug in to exceed 100k downloads.

Which would be only one application/installation per download and would never be impacted by the user token limit if the plug-in implemented the API correctly (unless the application/website has ~100K users).


it sounds simple when you post up the talking points, but that is not how it's working in reality.

I'm not posting talking points. I've worked with Twitter's APIs quite a bit. They really aren't that much different than other services apart from the user limit. The only real headache is that they do like to introduce breaking changes without backwards compatibility within major releases, but they do warn about those upcoming changes.

Harold Mansfield
05-19-2016, 04:59 PM
Which would be only one application/installation per download and would never be impacted by the user token limit if the plug-in implemented the API correctly (unless the application/website has ~100K users).
Which is very easy to do. This is what I'm saying.

Fenix Reaches Twitter's Ridiculous Token Limit, Disappears From Google Play (Updated) | Droid Life (http://www.droid-life.com/2016/04/25/fenix-reaches-twitters-ridiculous-token-limit-disappears-google-play/)




If you want to create a Twitter client -- and why wouldn’t you? -- you'll need access to the Twitter API. This is not something Twitter wants, or permits, to just be a free-for-all, and it limits developers' use of the API through a token system. Simply put, one token equals one user, and Twitter decides how many tokens each developer has, in turn dictating the maximum number of users any rival Twitter client may have. Anyone spot a problem?



Twitter assigns a maximum of 100,000 tokens to any client. This means that it can never have more than 100,000 users. But that's not quite the full story. Everyone working on the app uses up a token, as does anyone who downloads the app, uses it for a while and then moves on to something else.

Twitter's unfair token system gives it far too much control over rival apps (http://betanews.com/2016/04/30/twitter-tokens-are-unfair/)

Brian Altenhofel
05-19-2016, 05:45 PM
Still doesn't have to do with plug-ins reaching the limit.

For applications, keep track of tokens used by the application and invalidate those that haven't been used more than X times in Y weeks. There's a reason why it is part of the API. When you get to 50K tokens, request to be approved for 1M. When you get to 500-800K depending on your velocity, start making arrangements for a higher limit.

Twitter isn't just trying to keep users on their platform - they are also trying to ensure that the capacity and infrastructure is available for other applications to provide access to their platform.

ArJol
06-22-2016, 02:27 AM
So what does it mean, that you can do however long tweets as you want as long as they only contain links and images :eek: