Longer Tweets

I’ve got mixed feelings about Twitter’s experiment with allowing longer tweets (280 characters vs 140).

Like many users expressed on Twitter (of course) yesterday, I’m quite fond of the 140 character limit.

I don’t like the constraint when I compose tweets, but I love it when I consume them.

There are few things that make Twitter unique, defensible, and essential (contrary to many Twitter haters, it is all of those things).

At or near the top of the list is the sort bursty stream of information Twitter presents to the consumer.

There is no other place where I can consume a firehose of information across so many topics as quickly as I can on Twitter.

Just looking at these tweets from Jack and Biz, I am not sure 280 characters is going to be a good thing for the consumption experience.

On the other hand, I think running experiments like this is the right thing for Twitter and every app out there to do.

And they can’t run an experiment like this without telling the world about it. I’m seeing longer tweets in my timeline. They can’t keep that a secret.

The one piece of advice I would give the Twitter product team (who explained themselves in this blog post) is that they should test 160, 180, 200, 220, 240, 260, and 280.

I suspect they will get the biggest impact with slightly longer tweets but not all the way to 280.

I frequently run out of characters in my tweets. But generally not by a lot. If I had another 20 or 40 characters, that would reduce my character limit frustration significantly.

It’s also easier to introduce gradual change to a user experience than radical change.

And doubling the tweet size is a pretty radical change.

So I’m glad everything is on the table at Twitter in an effort to improve the user experience. That’s how it should be. But I’d be careful about this experiment and test a wider range of tweet sizes if I were them.

#Web/Tech

Comments (Archived):

  1. OurielOhayon

    i d rather twitter stay still on 140 character. but have more flexibility on media attachments, URLs and #. Need to improve readability also … Also crazy missing: an edit feature…

  2. jason wright

    when will we see the twoken model?

  3. Twain Twain

    I check Twitter once every 3 days, if that. I check Linkedin every day. The quality and relevancy signal of their feed is higher.

    1. fredwilson

      i never look at LinkedIndifferent strokes for different folks

      1. Twain Twain

        It will be interesting to see what MS does with LinkedIn’s data sets. I’ve gotten 1000+ view counts LinkedIn that wasn’t possible with Twitter and commentators often point me towards helpful research on Machine Intelligence for discussion.Conversations tend to be deeper, richer and more contextual. https://uploads.disquscdn.c

        1. WA

          Truth

        2. LE

          In your use of linkedin part of the benefit that you get (I assume) is that you get to publish your thoughts. As such even if you don’t get a great deal of clicks or likes you still get satisfaction from being able to express yourself. For example I probably would never comment using disqus on AVC if I couldn’t write essentially any length that I felt appropriate. And when I tweet on twitter nobody sees what I say. On disqus I may not get upvotes but at least I know that a certain amount of people see what I have to say.

          1. Twain Twain

            Twitter channels soundbites. The brevity thing is from Polonius, a character in Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’. https://uploads.disquscdn.c…From Spark Notes: “Polonius – The Lord Chamberlain of Claudius’s court, a pompous, conniving old man. Polonius is the father of Laertes and Ophelia. … Hamlet, realizing that someone is behind the arras and suspecting that it might be Claudius, cries, “How now! a rat?” (III.iv.22). He draws his sword and stabs it through the tapestry, killing the unseen Polonius.”There’s also Mark Twain’s comment on time: https://uploads.disquscdn.c…It’s just that wrt to Machine Intelligence, the complexity of the material means we have to think, discuss and make our case in full sentences, interweaved with lots of contextual references. Twitter doesn’t facilitate that.

        3. Pointsandfigures

          It’s considered “professional”. Difference in usage

      2. jason wright

        Then I might pitch you.

    2. Rob Larson

      I enjoy a much higher signal:noise ratio on Twitter by ruthlessly pruning noise emitters. If you tweet multiple times a day, the odds of you being a noise emitter are high. Not worth my time to sift through that to find the signal when there are pure signal emitters I can follow.

    3. JamesHRH

      Li is horrible.

  4. Joe Lazarus

    I prefer the 140 limit with a new attachment type (alongside photos, polls, etc) for longer posts. I’m picturing something like a barebones Medium editor for the long-form attachments where people could write as much as they want and readers could highlight and reply to snippets or the entire post. It would address the 280 case, tweetstorms, and capture some of Medium’s usage.

    1. leigh

      Actually i would agree with that. Attachments, links not the characters are a challenge …

  5. LIAD

    Parkinson’s law: work expands so as to fill the time available for its completionTwitter’s law: tweets expand so as to fill the available character limit.- I worry they’re on the road to discarding their core USP as the rationale currently cited for increasing limits will always continue to hold true.- Of all the material product issues and needed improvements they face. Concerns me they attack this one. Implies they don’t have much innovation left in the tank.

  6. Twain Twain

    Nick Bilton’s book called Hatching Twitter, pulls a quote out of the book attributed to Mark Zuckerberg talking to close friends: “[Twitter is] such a mess – it’s as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in.”Unfortunately, Election 2016 and the Russian involvement issue means they may both be in the same boat now. It’s an AI problem, a network theory problem, an adtech problem. A problem for democracy.http://talkingpointsmemo.cohttps://uploads.disquscdn.c

  7. Joe Lazarus

    How will Twitter evaluate the test with regards to the consumption experience?

    1. fredwilson

      who are you asking?

      1. Joe Lazarus

        Ha. Just thinking out loud. The AVC community, I guess. Just curious. Seems fairly straightforward on the creation side, tricky to measure the consumption impact.

        1. fredwilson

          Got it. Because I have no idea.

    2. cfrerebeau

      My guess (if this is language related) than twitter will try to measure an up-tick in adoption (# of tweets) coming from other languages. But Twitter also has to measure the impact to existing users and (hopefully) put in place some metrics and benchmarks to measure any degradation in user experience / consumption.

    3. Kirsten Lambertsen

      I keep wondering that, too. Seems like engagement rate with longer tweets vs shorter tweets would be the best measure.

  8. LE

    Two ways to address ‘I don’t like the constraint when I compose tweets, but I love it when I consume them.’a) Increase the limit slightly (say 20 characters) for everyone but then charge (yes charge) a premium for more characters. [1]b) Allow everyone an extra N characters per Y time period. After that charge. [2]The charge creates a disincentive for people to add extra characters helter skelter unless they really need them. (Even people with money don’t like to throw it out).[1] More or less the way airline luggage is now handled.[2] Similar to cell phone plans in the olden days.

  9. Girish Mehta

    Re : “…proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem…”The fact that twitter thinks this is a real problem may be a real problem.What does this do to address their business issues ? Are they planning to charge for longer tweets later ? (…a free experiment usually does not tell you what people will pay for later).There was little articulation of a “business” strategy behind this move. ‘Express yourself better ‘ is not a business strategy after you have been in business for 11 years.At this stage, you need to be able to clearly articulate where you are going (and where you are not), and how this move will get you where you want to go.The telling thing – that there is no telling of a strategy.

  10. LE

    Another way to deal (in addition to my other comment) with the issue of ‘but I love it when I consume them’ is to use the concept of ‘above the fold’ [1] with newspapers and also headlines as with news stories. You allow everyone X characters (slight increase) but then a click reveals more info (up to Y characters). You the preserve the environment for users but allow them the extra info only if they find the initial click bait interesting.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wi

    1. Vasudev Ram

      Good idea.

    1. andyswan

      Seems this comment section is forgetting who Twitter’s customer is

    2. Matt A. Myers

      This highlights that Twitter should maintain the creative constraint function that leads to longer form versions if necessary. The unfortunate part is Twitter can’t really track the amount of engagement and quality of engagement that occurs once users click to leave the platform. This is a problem with platforms that want to act as walled silos to gobble as much share as possible.The company that can maintain a $1-10B valuation while sharing out $1+ Trillion in value will win in the end – that’s a platform I want to create.And in reality if the pressures for shareholders wanting to increase valuation wasn’t as shallow and narrow-minded as it seems to be, the value that could be extracted by the ecosystem would be limitless – you just need to pick the bets you’re passionate about. Elon Musk is excellent at understanding this.

    3. @billg

      +1

    4. JamesHRH

      No leadership team of a public company:- has less of a clue on who is the customer- has less of a clue about the job their product offering does for that customer- or how to generate revenuethan Jack Dorsey and the team @ Twitter.Make any of @philsugar, @andyswan @jlm CEO & make anyone of @william, @arnoldwalstein or me VP Marketing ( Product & Sales ), and TWIT would be the hottest PubCo stock on the planet by May.A disgrace.Btw – not being able to add Dsqs users on iOS or in edits is brutal bug. I mean, you would think that adding Disqus users you know to a thread you are commenting on would be a no brainer.Obviously, woke up on the Houston is Humid side of the ‘be blunt’ or ‘be diplomatic’ side of the bed. Again.

      1. andyswan

        quit teasing my dream job

      2. JLM

        .I will need to pass on this opportunity as attractive as it might be. I am way too busy with my pool cleaning.You, Jimmie, are beginning to feel the impact of the Texas water. It makes you more truthful. Keep drinking, may want to cut it with bourbon or tequila, but that’s a personal decision.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…

      3. Matt A. Myers

        I wonder if USV has any UX people on their team to help all of their companies out, if they do then the portfolio companies aren’t hearing them.

        1. FAKE GRIMLOCK

          IF THEM DO, THEM NOT VERY GOOD AT IT.

  11. William Mougayar

    I kept nodding my head. I agree. Doubling the size might be too radical.Did they explain why they chose 280 and not 160 or 180 or 200?For sure, longer tweets means less consumption per attention span. Our time is limited.

    1. jason wright

      For both writer and reader. Time is the regulator, and not 280 or 2080.

      1. Lawrence Brass

        yesss

      2. Donna Brewington White

        Did you intentionally use “2080” (which is the number to convert hourly wage to annual)? At least in the U.S. Not sure how you Europeans factor in your looong “holidays” in making that calculation —had to put a European candidate search on hold midstream so that the hiring manager and most of the candidates could go away for a month. And really go away, like totally off the grid. I’m sure there is something right about that.

    2. JamesHRH

      That tweet length is a priority is a damning comment.#CluelessJack

  12. VincentWright

    Whatever incremental increase Twitter may choose, do it on a meritocracy.(Perhaps consider: age of account, engagement, blocks(?), reportings, mutes, TYPES of followers, percentage of malicious bot followers (not all bots are bad), etc.Accounts which threaten to annihilate 25+ Million human beings and/or deprive Millions of citizens of healthcare perhaps should be restricted to ~1 character per tweet… might help the health of Twitter and humans…)

  13. Rob Underwood

    The language difference is an important consideration.Japanese, like software engineering, sales channel strategy, and valuation, is one of a handful of skills I picked up along the way thinking they’d have value to the market but instead have become mostly personal passions/hobbies – I speak Japanese at home and read it, though my writing now is a little rusty.I’ve often thought “Wow, in Japanese you can say a lot more in 140 characters” because you can.Case in point — “walked” in English is 6 characters. In Japanese, it’s 3: 歩いた. The first character is a Chinese character for walk and the second two are in hiragana, one of two phonetic systems in Japanese, which is used here to conjugate the verb to the past tense.That’s just one example, but my approximation (and linguists have formal assessments of this of course) is that the ratio of between Japanese and English, because of the former’s use of the Chinese characters (“kanji”), is about 3 to 5.So there is a lot more said in a 140 character tweet in Japanese. And in Chinese 140 characters is really more like nearly 140 words (though not quite as some words are compounds of multiple characters).Of course, I don’t think the limit raise is language specific. But the language observation is important as for Japanese and Chinese at least there is already a lot more being said in each current length tweet already.

    1. Vasudev Ram

      Ha, interesting. Didn’t know that Japanese was more information-dense in that way. It reminded me of Sanskrit – not in a direct comparison kind of way. Just that Sanskrit grammar is very systematic, and also that words are built up from smaller words and root words, stems, etc., in a fairly scientific manner. Also, many words have more than one meaning – which feature is used a lot in poetry, etc. Of course, I don’t know anyone who tweets in Sanskrit …

  14. heuristocrat

    I’m a little disappointed at the lack of innovation in just changing the character limit. Why not do something dynamic that looks at the semantics of what you are trying to tweet in real time. Possibly even with automatic suggestions to make it shorter and better? The technology is pretty much here now to make that happen.Imagine how different Twitter would be if I typed my typical crappy “tweet” in 227 characters and it “suggested” a much better 80 character tweet? Or maybe it would take a 150 character tweet that was “perfect” and just allow the extra 10 characters.Arbitrary lengths on digital content remind me of programming decades ago when we used to cram things into “bytes.” With all this compute power, data and AI… we can do way better.

    1. lisa hickey

      I really like that idea. One of the things I love about Twitter is that my writing became more concise. The shorter tweets were edited better. Seeing that modeled for me would be awesome.

    2. Kirsten Lambertsen

      I keep suggesting a similar thing for them in regards to preventing harassment and abuse.Instead of thinking like Facebook or Medium (cough), they should think like Instagram. IG made everyone a great photographer. Twitter should help make everyone a great writer 😀

  15. PeterisP

    It’s worth noting that mot tweets likely will *not* get noticeably longer – as their data on e.g. Japanese shows, people who aren’t as constrained still write mostly short tweets. With the 140 character limit, the Japanese tweet length distribution is pretty much comparable (proportionally smaller but the same shape) to English, with the major difference being the ~10% English tweets who are at the very limit. In the new world, we’d expect the newly unconstrained English tweets behave in the same manner as the previously unconstrained Japanese tweets did – i.e., the short tweets will stay just as short, but those 10% tweets who were at limit will be slightly longer.In a way, they *already have* experiments with different tweet length – looking at tweets in a language that’s 15% more “character-dense” than english is equivalent to an experiment with a 160 character limit, and looking at languages that are twice as “character-dense” as english is equivalent to an experiment with a 240 character limit.

  16. awaldstein

    Less is more.Indisputable fact that we relearn over and over again.Less is more http://arnoldwaldstein.com/

    1. Michael Elling

      @Twitter Haiku:Suffering through tweetWhat will really happen whenWe have 240?

  17. Tom Labus

    Sometimes coming up a few characters short can be a real pain the a

  18. Matt A. Myers

    I wonder how long the experiment must last. It’ll be very different once they open the floodgates as well. A change from even 2% of people posting longer tweets to 5% will impact consumption and patterns significantly; calling a post longer than 140 characters doesn’t feel like it fits with the word ‘tweet’ as much now..

    1. Michael Elling

      It will absolutely slow down your scrolling. Adding 2x swipes fails the half-step law of demand; add another step to your process and you cut your addressable market by half. “Steps” in this case cover a wide range of actions on the receive side.

  19. falicon

    It doesn’t matter what the limit is, people will hit it and push for more as long as it’s there (and really that’s where the value in having a limit at all comes in).IMHO, there are other features and experiments that should be higher up on the list than this (including a ‘pro’, paid tier, that *could* include character limit increase).

  20. creative group

    CONTRIBUTORS:Hear hear! Town crier.!Thou consider us one of thee haters on limitations of communication. There is a comparable lifting of limitations with Twitter and Saudi Arabia ending the prohibition of women driving. What a parallel. Lifting restrictions.

  21. dan_leslie

    So they’re changing the character limit, but I guess they’re keeping the Nazis?

    1. Girish Mehta

      “The Alphabet ? Where we are going, we don’t need alphabets”.

  22. leigh

    What do we think Twitters responsibility is to the planet? I mean, Donald Trump getting 280 characters? That actually scares the shit out of me.

    1. JamesHRH

      Sigh.

  23. Frank W. Miller

    What do you mean by defensible?

    1. jason wright

      A rival service could be fewer characters and fill that ‘ void’?

  24. Elia Freedman

    I suspect it won’t matter what the limit is. Most of the time we will still come up 20-40 characters short.

  25. cfrerebeau

    I think the real culprit are the need for twitter to grow globally and the fact (as Biz mentioned) than 140 characters can be very limited in other language than English. Wish they keep 140 character in English and adapt for other languages to the right length.

  26. DaveGoulden

    If I were testing the character limit. I would make a large change like they did then study the range of lengths that are getting posted to see where a good break would be. This also gives a large amount of qualitative data on the feel of different lengths all at once.

  27. Pointsandfigures

    shorter means you have to choose your words better, make them impactful. Think about Trump with 280 characters.

  28. JaredMermey

    Maybe too domestic focussed as it doesn’t address different languages requiring more/less characters to produce a thought but…This feels like an overreaction where Twitter is trying to find a character length that allows users to add nuance to a tweet. Assuming nuance adds quality to a micro-thought at tweet level this bringing up “quality” of conversation at macro level.Twitter gets a lot of blame for our “headline culture.” This feels like an attempt at solving that.

  29. Donna Brewington White

    Focus group?Or is that what the Twitter community is?

  30. Jonathan Trenn

    I think it’s long overdue.

  31. Kirsten Lambertsen

    Huh. I guess it really must be the #1 thing they hear about from users. Most people in my Twitterverse wish they’d put way more focus on preventing harassment and killing bots (or at least tell us more about what they’re doing there).Agree with you on the testing. I have a feeling the ideal limit will be much less than 280. Great thing about a platform that size is that they should be able to find the answer pretty quickly.People who don’t like Twitter don’t know how to get the goodies from it. I wish they’d add an “invite a friend to join” feature. My mom jumped on Twitter recently, and I had to walk her through more than once on how to just @ me and what hashtags are for. She had them confused. If I could have (i) invited her by email, (ii) already been followed by her and following her as soon as she joined, and (iii) then had a nice bot walk her through doing all the cool stuff by using me as the target (“Let’s mention Kirsten to get her attention. We’ve typed @mspseudolus to get Kirsten’s attention. Now let’s send her a message….”), she would have gotten on-boarded a lot more successfully.

    1. Michael Elling

      Facilitate engagement. Elevate the discussion. Novel ideas!

  32. joahspearman

    Further proving your point, I didn’t even finish reading the full tweets you shared by Biz and Jack. I don’t want to read 280 characters from Trump.

  33. JLM

    .Before this goes any further, are you really sure you want to arm President Donald J Trump with additional words? Give the guy more canvas upon which to paint?Don’t get me wrong, love the guy’s substantive policies. Adore them.But, I am a little concerned about that level of word and sentence armament in the hands of dangerous wordsmiths. WTF might he do with it?This is fake news, but it is still important to consider.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…

  34. Pete Griffiths

    I don’t think this addresses the key problem – the low signal to noise ratio.

  35. hypermark

    Personally, I wish that twitter focused more on supporting richer payloads than longer messages.As others have noted, for a company that matters so much to so many. they innovate so little, and there is little coherency to their strategy.The fact that they have never figured out threaded discussions, killed their developer play twice and have never meaningfully evolved the client experience is just a head scratcher.The twitter app could be Facebook without the walled garden, but they seem to have no vision.

    1. Michael Elling

      @Twitter is an extremely useful knowledge-base/store that hasn’t grasped the exchange model concept; get in the middle of the exchange and make a fortune. All their actions reveal their mindset as a destination, not a pass-through exchange. They could solve an obvious problem we’ve all encountered where expressing a thought, meaning or impression precludes adding necessary context and linkages. A compromise might hold character count of non linked (blue) text to 140, allowing another 40 characters to provide further context and linkages.I said too much above and didn’t. 547 characters; 2x new limit. And no links.

  36. FAKE GRIMLOCK

    140 MORE THAN ENOUGH BEFORE.STILL IS NOW.

  37. Michael Elling

    @REM new song: Losing My Haiku.Seriously @Twitter, get a bizmodel.

  38. Girish Mehta

    That edit has been circulating a lot over the past day :-).

  39. awaldstein

    I don’t think one leads to the other necessarily.But I know–or better–I’ve been pretty successful practicing the Less is More mantra for a career as an approach to expression.Each person to take it to where it goes for them.

  40. PhilipSugar

    Winston Churchill said it best: sorry for the long letter but I didn’t have time to write a short one.Of course we cannot shut down social media platforms and I think that was tongue in cheek.But I do worry about three things:1. Attention Span2. Determining what is important3. Human to human interactionIt really saddens me to see families sit down at a restaurant and all four pull out phones and burry their head. What could be so F’ing more important than your family member. Not just a human being but a family member?I run companies around the world, the sun never sets for me, but I will never take out my phone at the table unless it is to share a picture or look up a fact that we are discussing and share it.These people have 9 to 5 jobs. What could be so important to ignore the human, the family member you are eating with?

  41. Donna Brewington White

    I’ve learned from you.

  42. andyswan

    Pascal said it first.

  43. awaldstein

    How we treat each others, our customers and the markets time is who we are.

  44. Lawrence Brass

    For me it is bad manners to pop out the phone at the table. Phones have evolved from communication tools to needy little creatures.I think that the best quality social interaction opportunity is seated at a table, sharing something to eat or drink. It is silly to waste that opportunity for lesser quality or trivial communications.

  45. LE

    There have been times that I go out with my wife and we are both on the phone. An example is when we take a long ride to get to a restaurant (down the shore) and we talk the entire way in the car. It doesn’t happen like that often but it does happen. Ditto we engage with the kids at home and don’t consider it a big deal when they want to check their phones and keep themselves busy. I think it’s a matter of degree and balance. But I wouldn’t say it’s wrong in all cases. So if you saw my wife and I in a restaurant sitting at another table you couldn’t base judgement on that one situation is my point.By the way I was told that the name for diners at a restaurant (a couple) who don’t talk to each other is ‘the dining dead’ by a girl who worked for me once.One of the first stories my wife told me about her first marriage was how, on her honeymoon, her new husband freaked out because she wanted to spend time on the porch just reading. He was very needy and didn’t want her to do that. In the case of our relationship it’s the exact opposite. I don’t need someone else to entertain me and think it’s fine if both of us do some reading not everything has to be interactive (at least for us).My first engagement (which broke up) was with a girl whose family freaked out when we wanted to take a walk after visiting them at summer camp (teachers who were camp counselors). My ex fiance thought it was strange also. She said ‘it’s rude to take a walk and ignore people’. So ok we were different. I couldn’t imagine what was rude about taking a walk in a forest with my fiance like that. She (and her family) did and hence we never got married.

  46. Vasudev Ram

    >It really saddens me to see families sit down at a restaurant and all four pull out phones and burry their head. What could be so F’ing more important than your family member. Not just a human being but a family member?Great point. I actually saw this sort of behavior parodied – that too, on the front cover of an issue of India Today (or some such mag, which is probably like the Indian equivalent of Time Magazine or Newsweek (were) for the US, as in, talking about the world, politics, current affairs, etc.)So, the cover showed a youngish couple perfunctorily [1] hugging each other with one hand, each one’s head over the other’s shoulder, while giving their main attention to their mobile phones in their other hand, that they were intently gazing at.[1] We have a term for that in India – naam ke vaaste – for name’s sake.This was soon after mobile phones came to India.The fact that it made it to the front cover is telling.Nothing is new under the sun.O tempora! O mores!https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…:)

  47. Sam

    I’ve seen that quote attributed to Mark Twain as well, but the source apparently was Blaise Pascal. A wonderful reminder.

  48. JamesHRH

    Churchill is a Ptihyy Quote HoFer.

  49. PhilipSugar

    I stand corrected. Thanks. Loved your comment.

  50. Donna Brewington White

    Love Pascal. Wanted to marry him but he was dead.

  51. JLM

    .I agree more with you than you do with yourself. We are losing the ability to converse.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…

  52. Vasudev Ram

    Good one, except that I would say it is the people who are the “needy little creatures” – need for their next fix, that is.

  53. PhilipSugar

    For me it is not bad manners, it is a reason for me to get up and leave. If you do not want to interact with me that is fine, but I can take a seat by myself at the bar, maybe I’ll find better company, but telling me that something on the phone is more important than me is a strong and clear message.Just say it to my face: “I really don’t care about you, something might be better”….ok….I can take that.Same as somebody that’s always late: “Hey I don’t give a shit about your time, mine is more important” Ok. I can take that.But just say it. Say it right to my face. Not doing it is more offensive to me than saying it.

  54. Vasudev Ram

    >I think that the best quality social interaction opportunity is seated at a table, sharing something to eat or drink. It is silly to waste that opportunity for lesser quality or trivial communications.Agreed. There’s a word for that, that I like the sound of: convivial / conviviality.

  55. Girish Mehta

    “She has lost the art of conversation, but not, unfortunately, the power of speech” – George Bernard ShawSomebody once said that many conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness. (Edit: – It was Margaret Millar).

  56. JLM

    .Haha, I know that person.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…

  57. Vasudev Ram

    That’s a keeper.

  58. Girish Mehta

    Ha ! I purchased Pensees last week and have just started reading it.One of my favorite quotes of his is – “All men’s miseries stem from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone”.That’s an unpopular idea in this day and age, but its one which, with each passing year, I tend to believe more.

  59. Girish Mehta

    I believe our friend @lawrencebrass:disqus is doing that deliberately, and quite elegantly I must add :-).Its a little figure of speech known as the Transferred Epithet.

  60. awaldstein

    And I from you my friend!

  61. PhilipSugar

    I have no problem with needing our own space. I have no problem with my kids on the phone while I am driving, I have no problem with taking phone calls in my office at home….At least 3hrs a day of time. I have no problem being on my computer and telling my son, I need to get this done right now.I have a huge problem if we have agreed that we are talking, eating, or meeting and I am giving attention and you are not.

  62. Vasudev Ram

    Got it, thanks. Good use if so. Just looked it up and saw this too:Hypallage:https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…which seems to mean somewhat the same thing.I realized after your comment, that it is commonly used in poetry, but had never properly noticed it before.Interestingly, that made me realize that I sometimes uses that device, too, like when I make some small mistake, say I drop something; – I say to myself: “the stupid spoon”, when I really mean “yours truly” 🙂 I think many people must do that.

  63. Lawrence Brass

    You are very kind my friend. :-)I wish I had such level of mastery of the English language.The truth is that those days when my english neurone is not working properly I can hardly communicate in proper English. If you don’t believe me ask @vasudevram:disqus

  64. Vasudev Ram

    That quote is a keeper too. In other words, the endlessly chattering mind. Been there, seen that, at least aware of it now.Coincidentally, I saw this HN thread about meditation just a few days ago, with some good comments in it:Ask HN: Do you meditate and which system do you follow?https://news.ycombinator.co

  65. LE

    I had a related thing happen to me with a college friend a few years out of school. He invited me to stop by his office in Newark (he worked at Prudential doing finance at the time managing something) and he had a nice office, secretary and so on. So I am sitting in his office and he gets a call about something he is working on and he proceeds to take the call and in front of me is making all of these faces (you know how people sometimes do that when on the phone) and I guess he was trying to impress me that he is doing big deals. To me it was just rude and he looked foolish. He didn’t even apologize and honestly anytime you have to sit there and wait if you are like me you get impatient fast. Even if it’s just 2 minutes it seems like 10. [1] Later he invites me and my fiance (at the time) to his apartment to have dinner with his future wife. We drove up from Philly (he lived in Hoboken at the time) and when we get there he decides to invite his neighbor ‘some guy’ to the dinner. Totally pissed me off. My fiance (the one I broke up with) thought it was great. She was super social and would run her mouth to anyone at any time. Didn’t even care if they listened. To me it was an insult like I don’t care about your fucking neighbor guy I will never see again I didn’t drive up to see him. (If it was setup that way it would have been fine but I probably wouldn’t have accepted).[1] I was impatient at the supermarket the other day so I decided to time it. And 2 minutes (what it was) did seem like 10.

  66. Vasudev Ram

    Based on both reading your comments here on AVC for a while now, as well as the interactions we’ve had off this blog, I’d say that except for a few minor issues now and then (and who doesn’t have that), your English skills are really very good. And I don’t mean it just about grammar and vocabulary but also about how you express yourself in some of the complex thoughts and discussions that happen here sometimes 🙂

  67. PhilipSugar

    I did that at the bridge that they were working on. Same thing.I never mind an extra person at dinner. I don’t expect a one on one unless we are doing that,One more never bothers me (this is from a person that goes to business dinners at least two nights a week)

  68. Lawrence Brass

    More kindness from a friend. Thank you Vasudev.As I trust your judgement, I will accept your words as a compliment. :)Been really busy, we have a chat pending.

  69. Vasudev Ram

    Well thanks for that compliment too :)Talk soon.