Monday, January 30, 2012

Twitter's Other Character Limit

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When choosing a username on Twitter, some ideas are to choose your personal name, your business name, or a name that is descriptive of your business.  Some usernames I think would be good are:


@NewYorkRealEstate

@DomainNameRegistration

@BasketballTickets

These are pretty good usernames and must be taken.  Or are they?


Everyone who knows about Twitter is aware of the 140 character limit on tweets you send out.  What this means is, you can write a message and send it (tweet it) out, but you can only use 140 characters or less to do it.  The box won't accept more characters.  You can add a url link now to tweets, and they don't count against the character limit.  That makes sense, because the link isn't really part of what you're saying, and some links can be pretty long these days (e.g.: tried linking to an online article lately?).

In fact, I remember when Twitter started out the big deal was you only had 140 characters to say what you wanted.  The statement above the tweet box used to be something like: Tell us what you're doing right now.

Well, the usernames I posted above don't exist because Twitter usernames also have a character limit.

Your Twitter username must be no longer than 15 characters.  This can include letters, numbers and the _ symbol.

I've never really heard anyone complain about the character limit on usernames, I imagine people just pick something that falls within the limit.  I also haven't heard of Twitter expanding the character limit on usernames, but I think they should.  It would open up a whole lot of other useful possibilities that many people would take advantage of.

For example, if you're a realtor and you live in a town with a name that is 6 characters or more, you won't be able to use @CityNameRealEstate for your Twitter handle, because 'real estate' takes up a whopping 10 characters by itself.

And if you want to check out how Twitter hashtags (#) work, and see popular Twitter hashtags, check out this Popular Twitter Hashtags site.

Perhaps as Twitter grows more popular this is something they will consider doing to help people find a catchy, nice looking username!

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2 comments:

  1. That's one reason twitter names hold the value - there are TRULY only one-of-a-kind 15L and fewer.

    ReplyDelete
  2. yeah it's will be good if member can use up to 25 characters. Because member can use their company and website as their username.

    ReplyDelete

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