Rest of the Day: Twitter Eases 140 Character Limit
Twitter is loosening the character limit that has been its hallmark since its launch. Although that’s not exactly what opens the floodgates; instead, images, links, and other media will no longer count towards the 140 character tweet limit. About this and much more in today’s news.
- Twitter first announced its intention to change the way of counting the number of characters in the media in May , and this change finally comes into force today . Images and other media now act as email attachments, so you can use all 140 characters for your written message. The 140 character limit is essentially a rudimentary limit based on the length of SMS messages. [Twitter]
- In other news: Google Photos makes it easy to share photos and albums with friends. Now you can simply select the people to whom you will receive photos from your contacts, and Google will do the rest. It doesn’t matter if they use Google Photos themselves; recipients will receive a link via email or SMS that will take them to the album. See Demo below. Google Photos also has new “concepts” for auto-generated movies that give them a coherent theme. [Google Blog]
- Waze will now give you parking recommendations. They are working with transport data company INRIX to suggest parking spots close to their destination. Details are a bit sparse (are they all paid? How about street parking? Apparently they don’t recommend parking in front of Walmart or whatever), but INRIX specializes in data like that. [The Verge]
- Using Airplane Mode on iPhone 7 will permanently disable cellular connectivity on some phones. If rebooting does not help, you should turn off the phone, remove the SIM card and insert it again (the classic “have you tried turning it off and on again?” Trick). Apple is working on a fix. [MacRumors]