Recently, I’ve noticed something. If you send me an email, the likelihood that I’m going to respond is pretty small. But if you send me a message on Twitter, the likelihood that I’ll respond is much higher. Certainly, part of it is that I get fewer messages on Twitter. But you might be surprised at how close it’s getting in volume when you add @replies to direct messages. The bigger factor for me, is the length of the messages.
If I open up an email and see it filled with paragraphs of information, guaranteed my eyes are going to glaze over. Certainly sometimes it’s an important message that I do need to read, but most of the time it’s just a core message filled with paragraphs of bloat. I don’t want or need the bloat, I need the core message. And that’s why I love Twitter. You simply cannot go over 140 characters. And more often than you may imagine, that’s enough.
Now, on the face of it, plenty of people will disagree with me on that point. But think about it. In an age where we’re bombarded by tons of information, from multiple angles, all day long, there is something beautiful about brevity.
I used to read screenplays for a living. Trust me when I say that there is no shortage of people who can blather on about something to seemingly no end. But the skill in writing a screenplay often came down to if you could convey what you needed to convey in just a few lines. It’s not an easy thing to do — at all. And while it’s not quite the same because it’s even more compact, Twitter forces you do to a similar thing in its own way. And Twitter is hardly the only form of communication that has done this.
Most users know by now that the 140 character limit of Twitter is actually tied to the limits of text messaging. Text messages can only be 160 characters long (Twitter needed to reserve the extra 20 characters for usernames). But do you know where the 160 character limit comes from?
The LA Times ran an excellent piece a few months ago about Friedhelm Hillebrand, the father of the modern text message. He dreamed up the 160 character limit while working at a typewriter in the mid-1980s, trying to see how long sentences needed to be to convey something. He found 160 characters was the magic number he kept arriving at. But the deciding committee for SMS still wasn’t sure until they looked at postcards and found that most of those had messages of 150 characters or less.
And so you see, while you may think Twitter’s character limit is silly or frustrating, it’s actually born out of two other forms of communication that are widely accepted and used the world over. You may not think of Twitter being just like a postcard, but in some ways it is — one that you can instantaneously send to many friends or acquaintances at the same time. And minus the cost of a stamp.
Even with the rise of technology, the lure of the short message remains. And that was the key reason why I found Twitter compelling when I first started using it over two years ago. I never thought of the limitation in a negative sense, but rather as something that could inspire creativity in messages. And could even spur communication.
It’s liberating to know that you only have 140 characters or less to respond to something. For a lot of messages, that removes a huge burden of trying to say enough to the person you’re talking to so that they don’t think you’re being rude. With a 140 character limit, a correlation between briefness and rudeness doesn’t exist.
And that’s why more and more I’m finding myself telling people, “Just message me on Twitter.” It’s a two-way street. I don’t want to have to read you go on and on about something that could be said in one line, and you won’t have to listen to me go on and on about something in response. Again, it won’t work for all messages, which is why Twitter or something like it will never kill email, but for a lot of messages, it works just fine.
Characters and time are saved. It’s a limitation that is liberating.
[photos: flickr/pink sherbert photography & inlaterdays]
Don’t use Twitter much, but brevity breeds creativity..
Agreed; I worked for a consulting company that trained it’s employees to properly write an email subject, who to cc and how to keep email messages brief. Failed.
yeah, along those line we just Yammer every thing to one another. works quite well.
long emails kill me. get to the point already.
Could not agree more.
Love the idea of no-email-fridays, bullet-point emails and communicating by phone. You get things done.
The problem is that everybody want to cover their ass nowadays and therefore use emails to say “I told him/you so”.
Who knows, maybe we even have “no-twitter-fridays” in about 5 years from now.
Cheers from Saudi Arabia,
Mario
I like that more than #followfridays
Agreed, with all the info we’re bombarded with, brevity gets through the door more easily. However, wonder if we’ll end up missing stuff. Who would have thought ten years ago that reading a few paragraphs would be a burden. We’ve changed, but for the better?
That’s up debate certainly, I think. There’s always a give and take. It would seem like we communicate more, just in briefer spurts with Twitter/txts/etc.
Short attention span…that becomes a problem of our modern life. People don’t pay attention anymore and that extends to their personal life too. Everything it’s on the rush. When was the last time we read a book from start to finish? I bet it wasn’t in the near past…
maybe the problem was that we had too long of an attention spam before. now we’re perfect.
Perfect? Not sure about that. Everyone’s complaining about how the we missed the “bubble” and how we got ourselves in this financial mess. Brevity is great when it works and when the right fit. But sometimes people need to roll up sleeves and dive into the details. Too long an attention span is likely better than too short, in most instances.
It’s teaching us to not communicate. Think outside the realm of business emails. People should know how to express themselves in detail, if need be. Businesses like Twitter are telling us in effect that we dont need to.
I would argue the percentage of instances where someone is being made *stupider* (see first paragragh) by such a (dis)service is higher than the percentage of those who are learning to keep it short and sweet.
Plus, there’s something to be said of linguistic minimalism (a la 1984). No worries though, in the end it will all be plus plus good!
I miss the days of letter writing and snail mail. There is a definite art to writing a good letter.
Short is really you know and I really agree to that line.
Word.
What was the middle bit again? I got distracted.
As did I, many times, while writing this.
funny. +1
nice
If what you say is so true, then why couldn’t you do it in 140 char?
I like short messages and I cannot lie. That work?
The same point I was going to make, lol, although not sure I’d give it the 140 limit.
“The title. The link. What do you think?”
less messages ???
I am sure you meant to write fewer messages.
Indeed.
god you’re cool
Twitter just likes a kind of SMS, the better part is : you can click on the link directly
I like twitter , especially with my automatic updating twitter software, then everytime I posted a new post, the twitter will automatically update.
G
Member of Amazon Discount Finder
http://www.tophotdeal.com
Yeah I didn’t really go into the linking element in Twitter, but that certainly is a huge part of the expansion of the 140 characters.
Short is tweet (TM)
Nearly went with that. Glad you trademarked it
3964 characters of text to explain how brilliant communicating in 140 characters is? Never has an article clearly defeated its own argument so brilliantly.
Each medium has its own function. Haiku is nice for some things, an epic novel for others. I like Twitter, for something things and I agree with MG on that.
But if you find you only want to receive 140 character messages from some people, then you are listening to the wrong people, and they have nothing to say.
That said MG, I welcome your counter argument, but I expect you to Tweet it to me.
Well put.
Not only does MGS fail to make the point, if you follow his logic we should have a better time with Grunter, a service that lets you send a chain of no more than 4 emoticons or 3 second sound cues at other people. Short is sweet after all, for neolithic illiterates.
Undoubtedly different mediums are good for different things, I’m just saying that for a lot of daily messages, quick blurbs will do.
I understood your point the first 3964 characters. My point, is that <140 character messages rarely convey any new or useful information. Something your 132 character point just proved by repeating your previously well written point in an arbitraily short form without adding any useful information. Tada!
(Side note: I did like your articles historical information. But it reminds me of 60’s intellectuals proudly trumpeting the end of intellectualism. And how did that all end up for intelligence in general? Well… Twitter and this self-defeating article. A decent read on this subject: http://www.amaz...s/dp/1585426393)
<140 character messages rarely convey any new or useful information. (emphasis mine)
I did an analysis of my LiveJournal entries going back several years and found that many (if not most) conveyed all the new and useful information anyone on my friends list would need to know. Thoughts. Moments. What I am up to. Invitations. Links to interesting things.
That said, some of the longer form entries were epic angst filled tomes that would make you want to puke most likely. Useful? Highly debatable.
I think you two could go round and round on just the aspect of useful to the point of exhaustion.
Actually, I think you’ve hit on a great academic study waiting to be done. I don’t think your sample size of one cuts it, but I hope someone does it sometime.
Personally, I think Arrington had it right. The power of Twitter is in the links and RTs which are by definition not new, but perhaps very useful in terms of disseminating information. So I misspoke there.
But even there, the usefulness of Twitter is ultimately determined by both the audience and the signal to noise ratio. Many will point to Iran and say that Twitter served a useful function there (it did), but would Facebook, Myspace, SMS, MMS, email, etc have served that same function if Twitter did not exist? Probably.
I agree that the corpus for a study has to be larger in and more inclusive. The body of study on a topic like the longer form blog or short form
microblog would be pretty interesting.
I think you’ll see more around this area of study applied to email since the email and spam markets have seen greater enterprise investment vs. purely academic interests.
A decade ago sub-2KB emails gave way to 5KB emails (so-called “rich editors”) that included HTML and other encodings. Around that time or before mailing lists gave rise to being buried under a 10-12KB missive.
By contrast, my own anecdotal experience is that late arrival users of the Internet and with access to broadband are more prone to attach 2MB or greater size attachments vs. sharing a link to a specific digital resource. i.e. people reading this forum might “get it” and send links but a lot of folks still take the attachment route.
Twitter value is easily seen if you have a specific scenario such as driving traffic. I can review my web server logs and Google Analytics and see that people tend to click links that understand what the link is… regardless of what the link might deliver.
As for Iran or a similar situation, a signal will spill forth through whatever means or medium is available. Maybe we’ll see visual couplers become en vogue (think of a 2D code printed large enough and with imprinting visible by imaging satellites — like a programmable bed sheet).
At the same time, when I DO find a piece of news interesting, then I prefer to read a well written write up on it.
This article exceeds 140 characters. If you can’t get your msg across in 140 characters or less then why should I waste my time with your bl
I think it’s both sad and ironic when a journalist writes a 4000 character/744 words piece about the blessings of a service that requires its users to reduce their every thought and argument to a 140 character brain fart.
Although over 40, I am no luddite: I have been building websites since 1995. I couldn’t survive a single day without e-mail. I use SMS (texting) religiously whenever I have to let someone know about something important, and I do not want to waste three minutes of their time with polite noise.
But I find it disturbing to see whole cultures that are finally able to communicate effectively (using forums, news groups and mail) into a sea of tiny, narcissistic 140 character bubbles.
Honestly: I hate Twitter. It may be good for conveying simple ideas and concepts (”Hey, check out this URL!”, “I hate X; I love Y” etc.) But most of our communication isn’t binary.
There is something called nuances. It’s what allows us to see and communicate the whole spectrum between “doubleplusgood” and “doubleplusungood”. In short (sic): It’s what makes us human. It’s what allows us to function as a society, to have reasonable discussions.
I know I’m being polemic here, but I cannot resist: Why this article (where you use your skills as a writer) when you could have told the choir over at Twitter how wonderful it is?
Again: I do not agree with you, but I love the medium you are using here – which you discredit to promote the modern day telegraph. Is this really the world you want to live in?
Agreed. Though I think what is more sad is that this new online culture has decided to use brevity instead of consolidation. They would rather be connect through 10 different media conduits; rather than just using the 2 or 3 that are well enough (phone/email/text).
According to MGS postcards were better than letters. I guess when you’re instructed from above to promote a certain service you’ll stop at nothing, no matter how ridiculous.
For those of us who actually remember ’snail mail’, can anybody really claim that postcards were preferable? Postcards were just as limited and inane as most tweets are. “We’re at DisneyWorld! We just got ice cream!”. That sure sounds familiar, and clearly MG’s quality meter is fine tuned.
I too would rather him express himself in 140 characters. His longer format is quite bad.
Twitter is just the latest example of brief communication, as you say, you use SMS “religiously whenever I have to let someone know about something important” so it would seem you at least partially agree with what I’m saying.
No, not even partially. David is saying a short medium is good for short messages. You (MG) don’t seem to grasp what you’ve written.
YOU’RE saying that Twitter “removes a huge burden of trying to say enough to the person you’re talking to so that they don’t think you’re being rude” and “I don’t want to have to read you go on and on about something that could be said in one line”.
If I can summarize your own text to one line as per your request: you need an excuse to be disingenuous & rude without offending anyone.
Newsflash: if anyone I met told me to Tweet them I would not only think it was rude, but I’d also have to seriously consider that the person had difficulty reading.
>if anyone I met told me to Tweet them I would not only think it was rude, but I’d also have to seriously consider that the person had difficulty reading
that sounds like a personal issue….
Correct…I would have a personal issue with someone daft enough to only want to communicate in spasms.
Whats “funny” is that in terms of security, a email is very much like a postcard.
Now encrypt said email, and it becomes much more of a letter…
Totally agree.
People always send me emails where you can see their thinking patern. It’s very annoying and it’s often hard to understand.
Twitter makes people sumerize and think before they click send.
It’s great.
One question. Where/when is the 160 character text message limit applied? I send longer messages sometimes.
It gets sent as multiple texts.
Why was this post so long?
twitter makes things easier
well said buddy!
aha, from screenplays to high tech product and service analysis, now i get it…
btw, i do totally agree with the postcard analogy, replete with postcard junkmail – in fact, junk postcards outnumber real comms, just like on twitter
Haha @sigler. Should have kept article 140 characters.
Must do Better
I agree with the dissidents.
Twitter clearly serves a purpose in our society, but MG is really going the extra mile here to sound stupid.
MG – I suggest an experiment: refrain from writing any emails over even 200 characters. Of course, URL’s would be allowed in your experiment. I’ll bet your your experiment ends with a new found love for being able to write an entire paragraph.
As I said, it wouldn’t work for all email communication, but for a lot of it, I would gladly do that if everyone would accept it.
I think everyone here who disagrees with your article would love to take you up on that. So please commence the challenge and write the rest of your articles for the week in Tweets only. (Don’t blame us if your pay check is smaller.)
“And that’s why I love Twitter. You simply cannot go over 140 characters. And more often than you may imagine, that’s enough.”
Agree to a point. I guess it all depends on the subject matter. Some things just can be summed up in a 140 characters, no matter how much you would like it to be.
I wonder how many people thought they were clever by complaining about the article length? Seriously guys.
I agree with MG. I like getting email, but there is too much of it, and a short message on Twitter is much easier to handle than a thesis by email.
I don’t know if it was about being clever rather than just being struck by the glaring inconsistency of using 4000 characters to explain why 140 characters is all you need.
I was certain that I was clever, no thinking was involved.
Why have the Tech Crunch blog at all?? Move it to Twitter. This would be logical.
I liked this article, not because it was once again about twitter, and not because you went over 140 character to explain why limiting people to 140 characters is good… No I liked it because I think I finally understand your posts “Used to read screen plays for a living” this explains allot about your posting style. Thanks for the insight. Happy 4th
Happy 4th to you too.
Postcards: One per day at most.
Tweets: Continuous and endless.
If Twitterers were as judicious about their tweets as belletrists were about postcards, then perhaps Twitter could be held in similar esteem.
You hold postcard writers in high esteem? Weird.
Sigh. Obviously the jab at Twitter and this blog post were lost on you.
Irony is largely lost here.
Okay, you were justifiably mocked for using several thousand characters to make the point that we need only 140 to express ourselves, but your point is well taken. I summarize legal opinions (www.gracesuarez.com) and it’s amazing how many times I can reduce a 40 page opinion to a couple of sentences. Ninety percent of our emails are just sending facts, the other 10% expressing our opinion. We can all cut down on word bloat.
In the style of another Twitter predecessor:
“TWEETS GOOD STOP
WORDS BAD STOP
MUST REDUCE COMMUNICATIONS TO VERBAL SPASMS STOP”
Having 140 characters to relay a message can be good or limiting depending on the message. Often I see people sending their messages across two tweets so they have 280 characters. In many cases, the 140 characters is just the subject with a link to a location with more detailed information.
artist jenny holtzer’s truisms are evidence of powerpacked brevity. for example, “elaboration is a form of pollution”.
the article neither damns nor even criticizes emails. he simply states that twitter is usually enough, and he is right. you guys are too smart by half
mg…
if you;re finding that the majority of things you do can be explained/handled in 140 chars…
i would suggest that you’re probaly reporting way too often, doing really unimportant work, or that you might want to combine your work units into more complex functions!
ie, one can write code so that each function is basically a line of code.. but that’s pretty stupid.
but if you really think that 140 chars is the special thing, then perhaps you should create all your TC posts as 140 char length posts…
now that, would get you more people reading you!!!
i can see it now, in a network systems course, the prof says , “explain how your project implements firewall principles at the TCP/Stack level” the student gives back a 140 char answer!!!
don’t get me wrong.. i’m not knocking 140 chars or 10 chars for a reply to alot of the crap that happens in the day to day conversations between people. but i also think that alot of the day to day conversations between people don’t need to be spouted to the world via some communications conduit either!!!
peace
I remember my Dad always telling my mom..”Please, just give me the headlines”
In many cases a headline will do. If I want more, I’ll click on the hyperlink. This is why I like Twitter, it handles that kind of communication and scales well.
It does -not- replace other kinds of communication, just an efficient way to find more diverse and interesting “long stuff” to consume.
If Marcel Proust tweeted his novel “In Search of Lost Time” one tweet per day, it would have taken him over 180 years to finish his notion that we can’t get back lost time. Like the time it took to read this post and comments, for example.
I’m just saying.
That was a long article to praise brevity.
on 12seconds.tv we took a poll on this subject a few months back (email vs twitter) and the results were really interesting – http://12second.../campaign/xobni – I was surprised how many people really believed in Twitter for a lot of email conversation.
Regarding the 160 characters on SMS: this was not the result of a decision, but only the remaingin bytes (140) in the packet message used by GSM. So I am surprised that somebody claimed this as an “invention”…..
I agree that for daily basic stuff, 140 chars or less is just fine.
MG, PLEASE TAKE A LOOK AT THIS!!!
Really though, this video has a pretty cool meaning to it! Please check it out, and tell me what you think afterwards!
http://www.yout...h?v=PN2HAroA12w
My personal opinion:
Email is crucial and inter-dependent on a web-based service. I can search Apple’s Mail or Microsoft’s Outlook for messages I received 8 years ago and reply to them. It’s about simple organization.
1. Rules
2. Contacts
3. Reply-All
4. BCC
5. Search
6. Calendar Appointments
7. no character limit
I have sent & received over 6,500 DMs on Twitter and have over 20 thousand messages in my sent-items folder in Outlook. Trust me when I say that I’m fully involved in both systems and have made improvements to my work flow to ensure I’m as organized as possible on both Twitter & Email.
I believe part of the issue stems from the use of Gmail. I know that you, MG are a lover of Gmail as are many of the cool kids but I receive just as much email as you and Gmail as well as every other web-based email isn’t the proper way to use email. Desktop apps are still better in every way. I use Google Apps and then IMAP to it using a desktop client and it works beautifully.
I’ve sent you a few messages that weren’t long and weren’t challenging to read through and you didn’t reply. I think people’s perception of email is different.
1. I send an email, don’t hear back. WTF
2. I send a reply or DM and don’t hear back, oh whatever
But business doesn’t run on “oh whatever” it runs on real communication, archived communication and indexed communication that email provides, it involves bringing a colleague into the conversation and talking numbers and it involves sending an lunch appointment to all three people to really make some progress. Twitter is not “begat” SMS or “begat” email
Twittter, just like blogging, SMS or social networking is a compliment to the core communication tool that has been around forever and that’s email. Email will never go away. I don’t say “never” very often but even video and IM chat won’t replace email. It’s just too valuable.
I’ve accelerated my being a total dick and possibly ruining friendships by attaching this bit.ly link to all of my emails.
“Don’t ignore my email:
http://bit.ly/2uDEz”
Honestly, complete strangers will reply back giving me kudos and no one has replied back saying it’s inappropriate because everyone has experienced the same issues with very important emails going unnoticed by professionals who basically do email for a living. It’s a lack of respect or just sheer disorganization. Whatever it is, it needs to stop and no band-aid like Twitter, Skype, SMS, IM, Video chat, IRC, Yammer or any other service is going to fix that.
Just learn to use Email effectively and stop making excuses for why you don’t reply to people.
Just learn to use Email effectively
Sadly, statistics are not on your side.
Consider that email is technology. Email is the response to the perceived need of communicating between two or more parties in a variable length and variably asymmetric manner.
My expanded thoughts on this are here:
http://fudge.or.../too-much-text/
It was a very lively discussion at SxSW a few months ago and I hope to try it again in 2010.
Maybe you feel that way because typing anything longer on the iphone keyboard is a pain!
Great comment! ROFL
that begat pagers
Great. Twitter. Another victory for St. Stupid, the patron saint of the 21st Century. First major victory: Google search, “indexing 5 billion pages of stupid”.
speaking of postcards, I think this is a nice project: http://www.mailtrail.org
so the idea that sms was a backend system for engineers which end users took advantage of was a myth then..
Postcards! That’s right, the previous generations main medium of information and distribution. 160 characters of all you needed to know.
I think I would add “Burma Shave” billboards to the historical thread of using Tweets for marketing!
I started glazing over years ago with holiday letters from friends.
I tend to write less words electronically but now leave long winded voice messages.
Twitter and FB have cut my emails by 50%. I feel connected, up to date and not quite so inundated.
Less is more!