Ellipses For Continued Messages


Author(s):

Stowe Boyd

 

In 140 characters:

Ellipses can be used to indicate a series of Tweets are parts of an extended message.

 

Description:

 

This is a reuse of the ellipsis in everyday writing. A user may be nearing the end of the 140 character limit, and will then use an ellipsis to indicate that the message will continue on to another message:

 

"It's odd how often I find that I need just a few more characters when getting to the end of a message. I should write a post about ..." 

 

which would be followed by a second post (presumably a few seconds later) with a starting ellipsis:

 

"... how to squeeze a few characters out by reorganizing the grammar"

 

Tweets in the middle of a series will have an opening and closing ellipsis.

 

Details and Use Cases:

 

If the message is being directed to someone explicitly, the opening ellipsis in the second and subsequent messages should follow the user name:

 

@ev ... and that's all I have to say about that

 

A closing ellipsis should be the last thing on the line, even if the tweet has hashtags and URLs:

 

It's odd how often I find that I need just a few more characters when getting to the end of a message. I should write a post #oddities ... 

 

Comments on Application Integration

 

One notion is that smarter Twitter clients could shuffle together continued messages, making them appear as if they were longer than 140 characters. And likewise, could allow users to automatically create longer messages and parcel them into continued messages.

 

Alternatives

 

I have seen others use 'cont' or 'cont... like @fittorrent

 

Liana Lehua (fittorrent) on Twitter

 

but I think this just requires unnecessary characters.

 

I also have seen '(cont'd)'  '... cont' 'cont.' and a lot of other variants, all of which waste characters, too.

 

Note" Twitter search doesn't find "..." so it is hard to judge how common its use is.