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Sunday, July 05, 2009

Fun Twitter game for bright people: perfect tweets

Because Twitter has the rule of 140 characters or less for a tweet an obvious and fun game is to produce perfect tweets, defined to be 140 characters exactly, but that's not enough as here is a perfect Tweet that I tweeted earlier today to my Twitter:

In my opinion, crucial criteria for a perfect tweet is that it be EXACTLY 140 characters, have few if any abbreviations, and is grammatical.

That tweet is 140 characters exactly and is (um, I'm fairly certain), grammatical.

Ok, updating as I got in an argument over this subject, so have a variant to handle both cases in case it turns into some kind of major thing:

In my opinion crucial criteria for a perfect tweet are that it be EXACTLY 140 characters, have few if any abbreviations, and is grammatical.

And later I found another...

The perfect tweet must have the following conditions: it must be 140 characters, be grammatically correct and have few if any abbreviations.

I'm curious, how many tweets on Twitter on any given day are perfect by those rules?

Here's one more perfect tweet:

My wild guess unsupported by inside information is that YouTube is now profitable. If so congratulations Google, and what took you so long?

I will admit that I don't in general try to make my tweets perfect but will if I see one approaching perfection work at it if I can, briefly to see if I achieve that, but if not, it's not a big deal.

But how hard can it be? I have one more perfect tweet:

Ok, I've locked down both variants of the "perfect tweet" which defines itself as perfect within the tweet while also being a perfect tweet.

That tweet is perfect.

(Hmmm...editing yet again to wonder, how many times can you use the phrase "perfect tweet" in a tweet which is itself perfect? I've managed twice above, can anyone do better?)

But when it happens I do wonder, how hard is it to do really? And, how did I do it?

Doing a web search on "perfect tweet" I see other people are using the term and differently. Oh well. Also one site has the phrase "twoosh" for a tweet of 140 characters "on the first try", which I guess means no editing.

Hmmm...maybe I should call my definition a "twee-dunk"?

Oh, I know, how about a "twee-three"?

No, basketball references may not work with all viewers...so I will still call it a perfect tweet, and others can do what they want.


James Harris