Anybody remember how twitter used to work over text message?

[swordlace@www.librepunk.club]

Anybody remember how twitter used to work over text message?

I think I broke that feature.

You could send and receive tweets, and do some basic interactions like following keywords - for example FOLLOW Guybrush Threepwood would text you any tweets about the classic Lucasarts Adventure Game series Monkey Island™.

So one day at work I had an idea. I took my Nokia and texted FOLLOW lol.

My phone immediately blew up. I got the next tweet someone posted that said lol. And the one after that.

I tried to text STOP lol but my phone couldn't multitask, so every new instance of lol interrupted my attempt to stop them. When my phone's text memory filled up (300!), I found out it deletes old texts and keeps going

So I turned my phone off to stop the flow (I didn't have unlimited texting, this was getting expensive!)

When I got home from the office, Twitter was down. For a while.

When it came back up, the text messaging feature did not come back up. Ever.

[swordlace@www.librepunk.club]

I have no proof I broke it, but my gf heard a very similar story from someone who used to work there so like, I'm pretty sure.

[considermycat@eldritch.cafe]

@swordlace Wait, wasn't the whole rationale for the 140-character limit the need for an entire tweet, plus username, to fit within a single SMS message? Which means that destroying Twitter's SMS function allowed for longer tweets, which is where the rot truly started to set in, which means…