Tweets are limited to 140 Unicode characters, meaning that even astral plane characters (such as emoji) only count as one. I’m also throwing in a couple notes on etiquette, because I think that’s strongly informed by the shape of the platform. Consider it both a reference for people who aren’t up to their eyeballs in Twitter, and an example of how these hidden features can pile up. Here, then, is a list of all the non-obvious things about Twitter that I know. There are rules, and the rules generally make sense once you know them, but it’s also really easy to overlook them. It looks like a dead-simple service, but those humble 140 characters have been crammed full of features over the years, and the ways they interact aren’t always obvious. One of Twitter’s problems is that it’s tilted a little too far towards the vim end of the scale. On the other end you have tools like vim, which consist exclusively of easter eggs. On one end of the spectrum you have tools like Notepad, where the only easter egg is that pressing F5 inserts the current time. I’d say this is actually a good thing! Using something for a while should absolutely reward you with a new trick every so often - that below-the-surface knowledge makes you feel involved with the thing you’re using and makes it feel deeper overall. Some features are, ah, accidental.Ī sufficiently mature, popular, and interesting product thus tends to accumulate a small pile of hidden features, sometimes not documented or even officially acknowledged. Some features are added just to solve one influential user’s problem. Some features you try to make invisible and heuristic. ![]() Some features are only of interest to so-called “power users”, so they’re left subtle, spread by word-of-mouth. You can’t just slap a button on the screen for every feature that could conceivably be used at any given time. We are going to fix the broken windows and confusing parts, like the syntax and rules, that we know inhibit usage and drive people away I mentioned recently, buried in a post about UI changes, that Twitter’s latest earnings report included this bombshell:
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