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Man Claims to Have Written Longest Tweet Ever (247 Characters)

by Terrence O'Brien on July 11, 2009 at 11:03 AM

Longest Tweet Ever, and It's Not 140 Characters

A lot is made of Twitter's 140-character limit, a defining feature of the microblogging site. But Twitter has a dark secret -- you can actually send a message of up to 247 characters.

Forbes writer Taylor Buley discovered that if you send a message longer than 140 characters to Twitter, you don't actually lose the rest of your message. The bug, or feature, depending on how you look at it, has been known since at least as far back as May, when Amer Kawar tried sending a very long quote and discovered that his full tweet was simply hidden. If you break the 140-character limit, Twitter shortens the post to 136 characters, and the last four spaces are used for an ellipsis. What you may not realize is that the ellipsis is a link. Click it and the full message is revealed.

Kawar eventually hit 246 characters, and assumed that was the upper limit, but Buley did him one better and sent what he claims is the longest tweet in the world -- 247 characters. What did he do with his almost double length post? Suck up to his boss Steve Forbes, of course. Well, we suppose it's better than getting yourself fired. [From: Forbes, via Gawker]

Tags: longest, superlative, top, twitter

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