Long Tweet Is Long: Bug Let You Go Way Over 140

Saturday, August 14th, 2010

Alexia Tsotsis works for TechCrunch as a writer. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles... → Learn More

Late last night Japanese Twitter user @sskhybrid tweeted out the following 2,135 character tweet, which was inevitably retweeted by more than 100 people. Translated it seems to be a jumbled version of his experiences using Twitter.

User @esehara has also jumped on the long tweet bandwagon, tweeting out Genesis 1 in its entirety (3,157 characters). The Twitter bug which has left many befuddled is exploiting a length limit flaw in the new t.co URL shortener, allowing users to tweet out non-URL links of outrageously more than 140 characters.

If you’d like to reproduce the effect, and it seems to be catching, you can visit http://twitter.com/share?text=&url=yourtext, add whatever you want in place of “yourtext,” copy and paste your new t.co URL to Twitter (or use the handy TweetButton) and long tweet away.

The 140 character limit is basically the definition of Twitter. It’ll be interesting to watch what, if anything, changes now that you can go way longer. In any case I’m really looking forward to Annotations.

Update: Looks like the nimble engineers at Twitter have disabled the feature within the hour this post went up, much to everyone’s dismay. Scripting News’ Dave Winer went so far as to create a web app for the Fat Tweets.


Company: Twitter
Website: twitter.com
Funding: $1.16B

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message. The company has been busy adding features to the product like Gmail import and search. They recently launched a new site section called “Explore” for...

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