Comments on: How Twitter Got Its Line Breaks

By: Jesse Gardner

Jesse Gardner — Fri, 31 May 2013 19:38:53 +0000

Honoring the double-space after the period? This gives me great joy. If I recall correctly, I think double-spacing after the period in Tweets was one of the first face-to-face conversations you and I ever had.

By: Wide Spacer

Wide Spacer — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 17:31:37 +0000

I’ll happily take credit for this change, since I’d requested it only a couple of months earlier:

http://twitter.com/WideSpacer/status/287436588294758400

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 18:40:03 +0000

Ha. We actually do call it the Merlin Mann filter. Well, not exactly that, but Merlin Mann is in the name.

We consider pretty much all linefeed-induced whitespace to not really be in the “spirit of 140″. Each blank line is essentially eating up 50 characters worth of space, even though a CR is only counted as 1. We’ve decided to allow a max of one linefeed between text lines because many people use it in reasonable, non-gratuitous ways. But using it to pad your tweets just makes your tweets bigger (bad) for no positive effect.

By: Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 13:34:09 +0000

Thanks for the insight, Mike! Please tell me that internally you refer to that as “the Merlin Mann filter”.

I’m still curious as to why you strip off the leading and trailing whitespace, though. I might really want an extra line at the beginning or end (or both) for dramatic effect, and that wouldn’t seem to run afoul of the “no century of blankness” intent.

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 21:30:12 +0000

We are trimming so as to allow reasonable use of linefeeds (haikus, dramatic effect) without encouraging or allowing “whitespace abuse”. If you insert 100 linefeeds between two lines of text, you aren’t really honoring the spirit of 140. There’s actually a ton of debate and thought that went into this, and I think we landed in a good spot overall.