The longest tweet of all time – 247 characters

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Taylor Buley, a writer for Forbes, has broken the Twitter world record. His tweet about Benjamin Franklin’s maxim about the inevitability of taxes was a humongous 247 characters long.

I wrote humongous to add a bit of oomph to the opening paragraph – I think it worked.

He used Twitter’s API for the feat. It allows for 247 characters. It cuts the message at 136 characters and uses the remaining four for a space and ellipses. An ellipsis is three dots in case you didn’t know. I knew, of course. I didn’t have to ask anyone. The 140 character tweet is what is displayed in the Twitter stream.

The ellipsis is hyperlinked, however. When clicked it displays the full message in all of its Twitter rule-breaking glory.

It’s not clear if it’s a bug or a feature as of yet. What is known is that Taylor Buley is a record breaker. He wanted to be the best, he wanted to beat the rest. He had the dedication. Norris McWhirter and Roy Castle will be looking down and smiling.

(via Forbes)

Twitter changes @replies to mentions

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Twitter has changed the term “replies” to “mentions” for a reason of pure semantics. Before any hardcore tweet heads out there start freaking out, nothing has actually changed or very little anyway. All the same, let Uncle Dan take you through it step by step:

Notice a section of the Techdigest Twitter page on the right. We shall call this Exhibit A. Note how Exhibit A now reads “@techdigest” where is used to say “@replies”. It said that because before it would only pick up @replies if @whateveryourusernameis was written at the start of someone’s tweet, ignoring all the times your user name might feature later on in the message.

Eg: @techdigest is really cool – would be picked up
Just going to have a read of @techdigest – would not be.

So, Twitter has got wise to this and is now sensitive wherever you mention someone’s user name. So, to let us know, they’ve started calling them “mentions” instead of replies. Make a big difference to your life, that one? Here endeth the lesson.

(via Twitter Blog)

Celebrity Twitter user Stephen Fry in LIVE LIFT TRAP SENSATION

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Stephen Fry, who has gone from obscure advert voice-over man and trainee Peter Ustinov to become the WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS PERSON thanks to his embracing of the tech world and Twitter in particular, has, once again, done it.

He got stuck in a lift.

Fortunately, there was a mobile signal available…