Is Twitter going to remove the 140 character limit?
Leigh Alexander and Jeff Jarvis over at Slate talked about why it would be a good thing to up the limit to 10,000 characters, in an appropriately long 10,000 character article.
What’s this all about? Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, posted a cryptic screenshot – via tweet, naturally – that is being seen as a sign that they’re planning on lifting the 140 character limit to tweets. Where does 10,000 characters come from? That’s the limit for direct messages, and has been suggested by internal sources to be the same limit being considered for standard tweets.
I would personally miss the brevity of form enforced by the current limit. Sure, it was sometimes hard to work with (maybe exclude @ replies or links from that limit?), but the medium created a new type of message. It fully embraced the perceived lack of attention span of its audience, and made me feel like a digital telegrapher.
Building a Startup in 45 Minutes per day While Deployed to Iraq
Matt Mazur, mattmazur.com
Matt Mazur is a great guy who currently works with Automattic on their data team. He has quite a history with the tech industry, with two startups under his belt while serving in the Air Force. While on deployment to Iraq in 2011 he added a third, Lean Domain Search. I’d been using Lean Domain Search before having met Matt, or even before knowing that he lived in Orlando and ran in similar circles to me.
Automattic acquired the company in 2013, making him one of four of their employees in the area. Speaking of Automattic, Business Insider just posted an article on the hiring practices of the company, like how employees can make their own hours, work wherever they want, and rarely even speak to or see Matt Mullenweg before getting hired.
Matt believes that he would have completed the project sooner had he not been deployed, but at the same time he was more focused in the precious time that he had to work on it. From Matt: “It’s good to have constraints that force you not to bullshit around. [The deployment] gave me space to focus on what was important.”
Matt’s story is a good place to look if you think that you don’t have time to work on something that you care about. It’s also a good example of how doing good work and caring about it can lead to great outcomes. Congrats Matt!
Saucy ‘Escort Cards’ Were a Way to Flirt in the Victorian Era
Becky Little, National Geographic
These days we have Tinder, but in the late 1800’s there was no such way to indicate interest in somebody. Or was there? This is new to me, but apparently some upper class Americans during the Victorian era would discreetly display interest in public by passing along escort cards to one another. We’re talking “May I escort you home?” here, not “Here’s ten pound sterling, be my escort.”
Just like current online dating, the field seemed to be played much more by men than women. There were a variety of cards, some innocuous, and some were decidedly not so.
Here’s what you can no longer say on Twitter
Jessica Contrera, Washington Post
Following back up with Twitter, apparently people need a reminder that they are a privately owned company, and not a public service. This is mostly apparent when discussions of acceptable usage of the service arise, and last week Twitter updated their policies on community abuse. Among the things that are prohibited on Twitter:
You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease.
The update announcement does make it clear that they are attempting to strike a balance between free speech and user rights, and many of the actions that would be taken to an account that is not in compliance stop well short of straight up account deletion. Still, it’s always good to have a reminder that what you consider your data isn’t only owned and controlled by you.
Facebook made its Android app crash to test your loyalty
Kwame Opam, The Verge
What if Google removed Facebook owned apps from the Play Store? Would users still use the social networks as heavily on their Android devices? The Verge suggests yes, based on the outcome of a report that indicates that Facebook purposefully introduced crashing bugs into their app for some users, in order to test their persistence.
The report by The Information shows that users would rather visit the website on their mobile browsers after an app crash than stop using the site altogether. This ties into a larger contingency plan that Facebook is creating, realizing that being beholden to any phone OS’ leaves them at a disadvantage that they don’t want to have.
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