Already well-known for its short character length limits, in a press conference scheduled for later today, Twitter will announce that it will severely shorten its allowable “tweets”.
“I’m frankly amazed at all the crap people fit into their tweets,” said Twitters’ founder Jack Dorsey by phone with me yesterday. “By shortening tweets to 20 characters, they’ll be able to put their bit.ly link, and still have about seven characters left over for a snappy headline.”
Prior to this decision, “twitterers” could put in up to 140 characters, allowing Twitter tripe such as, “Recall the Tiger Woods apology… Is it me, or did it look like he was having oral sex during the press conference?” Asked whether shortening tweets by two-seventh can hamper speech on Twitter, Dorsey quickly replied, “You can say the same thing with: ‘Tiger got oral on TV’.”
Twitter rights groups have promised a fight, with its spokesperson Doug Degas tweeting the following announcement to his 31,794 followers: “#Sign #our #petition #to #keep #us #blithering #on #twitter http://bit.ly/c1PsXn @mrsaki @sextmessage #dontyouhatewhen (This is an RT must!)”
Filed by news staff, April 1, 2010
[Note added April 28, 2010: Now that April 1 is long past, I probably should emphasize that this was written on April 1.]
Hey Mark, I read somewhere that you’re going to be acquiring an fMRI machine and EEG system for your lab. You were quoted: “You can only get so far with pen, paper, and insight. Aren’t high-tech toys what make us scientists?”
🙂
Way too ramblingly long for me to possibly interpret. Could have just said: “fMRI turns shit gold”.