Rest of the Day: Twitter Eases the 140 Character Limit
The Twitter rules are rife with little things that can be difficult for strangers to understand, and in its never-ending effort to attract new users, Twitter is making a few changes. You will soon notice that images and media no longer count towards character counts, and responses will be handled slightly differently.
- Media attachments such as photos, videos and GIFs will no longer count towards the 140 character limit , just like @usernames when they are at the beginning of a message. (The extra @usernames mentioned in the post do the tally, however.) It’s easy enough to figure it out, but then things get more complicated: Previously, posts starting with @Username would only be visible to the people who followed you and the recipient of your post. Tweets starting with @username will now be visible in the timeline to everyone who follows you , regardless of whether or not they are following the recipient. (This is separate from private messages, which are private.) Additional replies in a conversation will not be visible to everyone unless they expand the conversation. Anyway! Now you can retweet yourself and then this tweet will be shown to everyone. I feel like I’m describing an esoteric card game. You can also retweet your old tweets. In any case, the main takeaway is that the media will no longer count towards the character count. [Twitter]
- Now for the rest of the news besides Twitter: you can now batch edit timestamps in Google Photos. This is useful if you’ve never bothered to set the correct time on your camera and need to correct the date on your photos. [Google Photos]
- The Moovit public transit app now has bike sharing programs if you want to pedal a little. So, for example, if you are going to visit New York, you can find out where to get a Citi Bike, how many are in stock and where to drop it off. [Moovit]
- Here it is: Rumor has it that Apple will create its own rival Echo based on Siri. The information says Apple will soon open the Siri API to third-party developers, so other apps and services will work well with the rumored device. (Yes, I have to stop using that Tinder line .) [Gizmodo]
- Foursquare has a new bot that will recommend where to eat or drink before you even think about asking. Marsbot is a new experimental app that offers suggestions based on your location and context. So far, he is only familiar with San Francisco and New York, the cities most friendly to bots. [Foursquare via The Verge ]