[baddox]

That's an interesting perspective. I don't use Twitter for DMing, but for the services I do use to DM (mostly SMS/iMessage and Facebook) I find that I rarely (if ever) get close to 140 characters. Yet I do find the 140 character limit for public tweets annoying on a regular basis. I realize that's supposedly a fundamental part of Twitter's brand or niche, but I'd much rather see them remove the character limit for public tweets.

[giovannibajo1]

They should lift the 140 char limit for conversations (=sequence of alternating tweets that begin with mentions), after the first 2-3 messages. This would allow people to begin engaging intelligent discussions, while leaving the majority of tweets in anyone's timeline small and concise.

[mdaniel]

I believe that LinkedIn charges you a "conversation token" to send an email, but you get it back if the recipient replies. If we extend that mental model a little, a more conversational Twitter might make it so one could receive 2x the last character limit for every reply for that specific conversation.

I'm certain someone will illustrate with game theory how that system would do weird things in the context of a multi-person interaction.

[technomancy]

Basically the only DMs I've sent using twitter are variations of "What's your email address?" and "What's your phone number?"

[justinmolineaux]

Thanks! That's interesting too - lifting the public tweet limit would also fundamentally change Twitter. As an author of tweets, I think I'd like it. I think @byuu mentioned it would promote intelligent discourse on important subjects - I agree.

As a reader though, I don't want to lose the high-bandwidth nature of Twitter. The headline thought/status/caption in your stream, with a link to the details hits an information consumption optimum for me.

It's really that first DM in a conversation where I think 140 characters causes me to leave Twitter. Maybe I'm doing it wrong - often trying to stuff salutation + context + question into the first DM. If the convo gets past that, then yeah, 140 is fine.

[rconti]

I guess I just don't "get" twitter, but despite the character limit, I still feel like a high-res screenful of tweets still contains almost no content. The webpage limits tweets to a very narrow column in the middle of the browser window, and there's a ton of fluff at the top and bottom of every tweet. I've never been successful at curating my twitter feed; I follow way fewer people than I'd like to, and still see way too much junk.

Facebook is getting worse about "junk" too, but somehow I see far more content per pixel on Facebook than I do on Twitter.

I'd like to think limiting content to 140 characters would make twitter more information-dense, but it doesn't feel that way in my anecdote.

[laxk]

You can try to use TilePad (http://tilepad.co). It is a Chrome extension that arranges twitter timeline in columns, allows to configure a tweet design, and much more.

[baddox]

A huge portion of tweets in my stream have a hyperlink anyway, so in some sense the "bandwidth" is much more than 140 characters per tweet. I think they could allow longer tweets without compromising much. Perhaps the compose tweet text box could even indicate what is "above the fold," which would be limited to 140 characters.

[jay_kyburz]

I think they should keep the 140 limit for the body message, but exclude URLs and have a separate limit for some additional hash tags.

[sdrothrock]

The issue I've always run into is that while 140 characters for a message is largely fine, it's horrible when it includes URLs and usernames.