International Longest Tweet Contest Seeks Entries

An anonymous reader writes "The 1st International Longest Tweet Contest is open for submissions until April 12. It looks to be a take-off of the famous Obfuscated C Contest. So far the record is 4.2 kilobits encoded per tweet, based on exploiting the fact that Twitter actually passes the full 31 bits of ISO 10646 (the international standard that Unicode is based on), not the roughly 20.08 bits/character of Unicode itself."

Re:still useless

[dotgain]

^ this.

It's not all about you. I don't tweet much, but I find the service invaluable (though also potentially distracting) as a means of "keeping up with what's going on".

By the time the 6 O'clock news rolls around each evening, there's nothing on there I haven't already learned. Extreme weather alert? Tweeted. Sure, by looking at the "live feed" I can see that 80% of the tweets are moronic drivel, so I don't follow morons. I follow people I was already interested in before, and through that learn of other people who say things I follow interesting (thanks to people I follow "re-tweeting" them).

Once upon a time I couldn't see what all the fuss was about and found humour in the name, but when it hit me what you can use it for it was amazing. I now only miss tweets of people I follow when I'm asleep.

Re:still useless

[sootman]

Really? I'd think it's just the opposite. Even a lowly-rated comment here will be read by hundreds, if not thousands, whereas if you're just some loser on Twitter with no followers, anything you post will probably be read by no one at all.

Re:still useless

[dotgain]

It could be that, I use both FB and Twitter for very different things. One big difference twitter does not use mutual "Friendships", you do not necessarily follow back people who follow you. On FB I never friend people I don't know (and only have 32 in the list), on twitter it's a different story, and many of my actual friends don't have accounts. Similarly, many people I do not know follow me, but that's fine, I consider twitter my "public" account. You can protect your twitter feed and manually approve followers; in my experience few people do.