Technology Mania : tweet

Showing posts with label tweet. Show all posts

Saturday, April 1, 2017

Twitter has updated its character limit as it stops counting usernames in replies

Image Credits: REUTERS

Giving its over 300 million users more room to reply to other people’s tweets, Twitter has announced that it will not count usernames towards a 140-character limit. “Now, when you reply to someone or a group, those @usernames won’t count toward your Tweet’s 140 characters,” Sasank Reddy, Product Manager at Twitter, said in a blog post late on Thursday.

With this change, Twitter has simplified conversations. “Who you are replying to will appear above the Tweet text rather than within the Tweet text itself, so you have more characters to have conversations,” Reddy posted. You can tap on “Replying to” to easily see and control who’s part of your conversation.

“When reading a conversation, you’ll actually see what people are saying, rather than seeing lots of @usernames at the start of a Tweet,” the post further read. Last year, media reports said that Twitter is building a new feature that will allow users to tweet longer – even in 10,000 characters – than its traditional 140-character limit. The 140-character limit has been around as long as Twitter has and has become part of the product’s personality.

Publish date: March 31, 2017 11:11 am| Modified date: March 31, 2017 11:24 am

Sunday, January 29, 2017

Twitter releases letters that reveal extent of US Government’s demands for user data

28 Jan 2017 , 12:20

Twitter on Saturday became the latest tech giant after Yahoo, Cloudflare and Google to release national security letters (NSLs) from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that forced them to reveal user data to the government.

The tech companies have been speaking up since the last eight months about the NSLs “that came with gag orders that prevented Twitter from telling the public or the targeted users about the government’s demands in two letters it received in 2015 and 2016”, Tech Crunch reported.

The FBI recently lifted these gag orders, allowing Twitter to acknowledge the NSLs for the first time.

In the newly published NSLs, the FBI asked Twitter to turn over “the name, address, length of service, and electronic communications transactional records” of two users.

The micro-blogging site said it gave a “very limited set of data” in response to the requests and demanded more freedom in keeping their point.

“Twitter remains unsatisfied with restrictions on our right to speak more freely about national security requests we may receive, Twitter associate general counsel Elizabeth Banker wrote in a blog post.

“We would like a meaningful opportunity to challenge government restrictions when ‘classification’ prevents speech on issues of public importance,” Banker added.

Twitter has already disclosed these two letters and informed the targeted users and is suing the Department of Justice in an effort to speak more publicly about secret requests for user data.

IANS

Friday, December 30, 2016

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey hints at a ‘tweet edit’ function for the microblogging site

Jack Dorsey is the CEO of both Square and Twitter. Image: Reuters

By tech2 News Staff / 30 Dec 2016 , 13:00

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has hinted that the ‘edit’ functions to edit mistakes may soon be coming to the platform. Dorsey started an impromptu Twitter town hall with the users last night asking them about the most important things that Twitter can improve or create in 2017. He posted his thoughts about the edit feature as a response to the tweets asking for the implementation of the feature.

He pointed out that the company was looking into the request since a long time and that the feature is “def needed” for all the users to improve the platform as a product.

Dorsey responded to users by asking for suggestions on how to implement the feature because of the complexities involved in adding the feature. He asked if the users need a 5-minute window to correct the mistakes done while tweeting or the edit anytime implementation better for the users.

Dorsey did point out that anything beyond a time window based edit feature would require tweet ‘revision’ history so that users can check what the original tweet was in case any troll tries to take the conversation out of context. One Twitter user suggested that the edit function should be rolled out for users with verified Twitter accounts. Dorsey clarified that the feature would roll out to all the users and not just the ones with verified accounts.

Even though he identifies edit feature as one of the most requested and important things on the platform, the discussion does not automatically mean that the feature is confirmed. There is no official confirmation at the moment, but the discussion itself is better than a situation where users think that Twitter is not taking their feedback into account. This comes right after the company launched 360-degee live videos on Twitter and Periscope.

One interesting conversation in the Twitter town hall was the interaction between Dorsey and Bored Elon Musk, a parody account of Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk. Bored Elon Musk suggested verifications for parody accounts to which Dorsey replied with “boring”. Bored Elon Musk quipped with “Multiverse Twitter access for seeing tweets from yourself and yourself and yourself” as an improvement by Twitter. Dorsey responded with humour that “now we’re talking”. Not Jony Ive jumped in to approve of the ongoing interaction with a classic “+1”.