140 Characters No Longer the Twitter Limit

As much as the 140 characters limit defines Twitter, it often leads to frustrated users, from poets and recipe writers to businesses and the verbose. Now a new Twitter service, Maxitweet, has found a way to extend this limit.

Christchurch, New Zealand Aug 14, 2009 -- Type "140 characters" into Twitter's search box and the resulting tweets come flooding in - predictably the majority of them laments about this contraint. A new Twitter service, www.maxitweet.com , has found a way around the restriction by clever use of letter-like symbols called Unicode characters.

"Maxitweets" are up to 200 characters long, an increase of nearly 50%, and have opened up new possibilities for the fast growing Twitter communications platform.

For example, tweeted recipes ("twecipes") are easier to read with the extra space available. A number of poets have also responded enthusiastically. A limerick afficionado, who had given up on trying to tweet the humorous five-liners because they tend to be around 180 characters long, now posts them several times a day as @limerik. And one prominent use of Twitter - breaking news - is more immediate when maxitweets are used: instead of just a link to the story, the news item itself is displayed.


How does it work?
Twitter caters for users in many countries and therefore transmits in a universal font language, called "Unicode". It contains over 100,000 "glyphs" in hundreds of languages, as well as pictural symbols and technical icons. Maxitweet was the first to discover that sometimes one glyph resembles two or more normal letters.
For example, the Chinese character "ji", meaning "to calculate", is written 计 and reduces the character count by one in a word like "h计". Another example: the physics symbol for the calorie unit, ㎈, replaces three letters in words like economi㎈ and ㎈endar.

"We spent weeks combing through thousands of glyphs in all sorts of languages - Cyrillic, Thai, Arabic, Hiragana - finding those rare ones that resemble characters in our Latin script," says Wytze Hoekstra, project manager at FrisianStyle Productions, which runs Maxitweet.com. "We also obtained good results by manipulating the white spaces around full stops, commas and capital letters. We then wrote a javascript engine that takes care of the behind the scenes compression and delivers a user-friendly experience."

Will the new limit improve the Twitter experience? Even though 140 was enough to produce many memorable tweets, like those collected by www.besttweets.com - "Museum for the Art of Micro-Elegance" - it remains to be seen whether the expanded limit will take Twitter to new heights. Some say 140 characters is too many. "I'd only call about 30 of them « characters ». The other 110 are quite boring." - Amee Brock (@Aimee B_Loved).

Perhaps the argument is best summed up by Jason Shellen (@shellen): "When people ask me about the brevity of Twitter I always tell them « You can really say a lot in just 140 characters. More than you would th ".

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Website address of Besttweets.com, mentioned in this article:

www.BestTweets.com
Also tweeted daily by @BstTwt