Comments on: How many characters do you tweet?

By: Fabian

Fabian — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 20:16:06 +0000

Another explanation for the tweets >135 characters could be from software that automatically breaks longer messages into multiple tweets.

By: Amy

Amy — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 08:58:23 +0000

Wow. Super cool. I’m definitely that person trimming my tweets down to barely make the limits. But I’m kind of a n00b at Twitter. Does average characters per tweet decline the more someone uses Twitter? My guess would be yes. Veteran tweeters get better at the genre, expressing themselves using the tiny textual norms of the Twitterverse?

By: Sarah

Sarah — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 01:20:09 +0000

It would also be interesting to see how many of those are retweets – that “RT @user” adds a few characters, so the length of the original tweet is actually less. We know that there are a lot of retweets floating around out there…

By: paul

paul — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 08:52:21 +0000

Cool… stuff. Interesting that it’s different from this: http://blog.hubspot.com/Portals/249/sotwitter09.pdf (pg. 6) They report much longer tweet lengths. But maybe their dataset is skewed towards people who care about how good their tweets are…

By: ayman

ayman — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 02:42:54 +0000

I ran the graph against every twitter dataset I had, it always fit this shape regardless of the dataset’s size or focus (public timeline samples to event specific). I’m not at liberty to disclose the nature of these tweets beyond the sample size.

By: naaman

naaman — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 02:40:18 +0000

Very cool. Do you wish to tell us what type of dataset you explored? Do you think the dataset you looked at had any impact on the histogram, or do you think any collection of tweets will give us the same results?

By: ayman

ayman — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 02:19:25 +0000

Liangjie Hong: I forgot to mention, i removed all the ‘high byte’ character sets before making this graph for that very reason, so this is latin encoding only.

By: Liangjie Hong

Liangjie Hong — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 02:15:08 +0000

Another interesting thing is, in different languages, 140 “characters” would mean totally different things. For example, in Chinese, it represents 140 “words” (usually, you need 140+ ~ 200 English words to translate them). Therefore, just in my own case, most Chinese tweets contain a lot more information than English tweets.

By: Judd

Judd — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 23:57:34 +0000