This is bad news. Opera runs products like Opera Mini, Opera Turbo, Opera Max, and SurfEasy VPN. Each of these products require routing data through Opera's servers. Trust is of paramount importance. And Qihoo is not a company that I trust.
If you need a thousand words to say something, put it on Medium or Tumblr or any of the hundreds of other blogging and social media platforms. I dont mind a minor tweak of the char. limit, but the rumored 1000 word limit is way too much.
The beauty of Twitter is its brevity. It forces people to cut out the flab and be concise. This in turn makes the entire steam easily glanceable. Huge walls of text will take away much of what makes Twitter special.
I'm 100% with you. Honestly, my "prefect Twitter" would be to keep the 140char limit, but to exclude @ mentions, photos, and links from the limit.
That way users can be a bit more expressive without the word-barf walls of text which make Facebook, Tumblr, and other social platforms a nightmare to read through.
Playing devil's advocate, my first response would be to register accounts for, say, the 2,500 most common English words and then compose some rather nice essays.
> I'm 100% with you. Honestly, my "prefect Twitter" would be to keep the 140char limit, but to exclude @ mentions, photos, and links from the limit.
Right now, there's a real benefit to having short Twitter handles, because they count less against the limit (longer ones really add up in Twitter conversations that involve multiple people).
I understand why usernames count towards the limit, but I wish they didn't.
You know what a good solution to that? Constant cost for @mentions. Each one costs you two characters.
While you are at it, urls cost you 5. Images cost you 10.
Removes the benefit of shorter twitter handles, longer twitter handles doesn't fuck up what you are trying to say and, you can talk to multiple people in the same tweet.
However, I feel like it would be weird for people to adopt, and probably put people off of Twitter, since paying attention to a 1-1 limit is annoying enough.
I don't think it would require any conscious effort on the end user, the remaining char counter would handle all of this for them so adoption is painless
That makes sense to you (a web user who wants to use multiple platforms, and likely already does) but not to Twitter (a business whose financial interests are best realized the longer you stay within the walled garden of their product.) Twitter doesn’t want you to leave their ecosystem, so they’re considering changing the boundaries of the ecosystem.
Which is all well and good, but when you take away too many of the features which make that ecosystem unique, there's less incentive to use it over anything else.
Another option would be to turn lengthier posts into cards. Uses existing Twitter concepts, doesn't change anything for existing users, lets people express more complex ideas. Seems like an easy change and a big win for everyone.
I assume that this is what's going to happen. While I'm a bit nervous about this whole "10,000 char" thing, it would totally destroy their current user experience and make Twitter unreadable if they actually implemented it in your feed.
Still, I don't quite know if I like that idea. I guess we'll see.
Totally. There's no way they'll dump 10,000 character posts into your feed without providing a summary and read more link. That would destroy the experience on any social network, which is why Facebook already summarizes lengthy posts automatically. A tweet-sized summary would make everyone's complaints about this a total non-issue.
For reference, here's what 10,000 characters looks like:
In figuring itself out now, Twitter's real problem that its existing users haven't had to experience any real degree of change for a long time. Facebook was kind of smart to "move fast and break things" and ignore the complaints from people who don't want to have to learn new ways of doing things :P
I'm in two minds regarding this. This reminds me of the clampdown in many of the middle-eastern countries during the Arab spring. On Principle I don't believe that the state should be allowed to place such restrictions on civilian freedom. However, I can't deny that the measures worked. The protest had become extremely violent and needed to be defused instantly. This measure possibly saved lives.
Could the revolt have been defused by Britain granting more voting power to American colonial authorities? Or would they continue to demand placing their community above the rest by being completely autonomous?
Poland is the prime example of getting rid of unwanted government(communist in this case) without resorting to violence, and that's despite the entire country being under martial law with severe restrictions on travel and trade for a few years. It can be done.
Indians made this (see Gandhi & Indian independence movement), but I don't sure "americans"(mostly english people living overseas those days) were capable for that(especially with taking natives genocide & slavery into account).
In India's case Britain was already in a situation where it half-wanted to leave (due to the war, etc). This was not the case with the US.
I'm pretty sure India would have had a violent movement too if WW2 hadn't happened and Indians had better access to firearms and stuff. Violence was less of an option because the British government deliberately ensured that the locals were suppressed. Whereas in the U.S. the British were exploitative of the colonies, but they did not suppress the people (until the movement started); after all, those were their own people.
We did, in fact, have a violent movement, in 1857, just that it didn't work out too well.
I don't think that "Indians are less violent" is really an argument to be made here.
How much time have you spent in India? I've been for half an year there, and 1.5 months in US. My feeling is americans are MUCH more aggressive in general
Born and brought up in the US, been in India for the last ... 8 years. (Indian origin).
That's quite anecdotal at best. My experience has not been the same, I've seen ample violent elements in both places. Indians are generally subtler in our social cues, and that might make Americans "louder" (which feels like aggression), but certainly not more violent.
It also might matter which area of either country you've lived in. Boston(-ish) and Mumbai here.
An acceptable argument for India being more nonviolent would be the entire NAM movement among other initiatives, but there are still many, many other reasons why India's nonviolent independence movement worked -- Indians being nonviolent, if true, would be a small contributor to it, not the main reason. Besides, like I said, we had a violent independence movement and failed. Technically, two, if you count the INA, which actually managed to liberate many areas.
There is a certain threshold below which this will work and beyond which it will backfire bad; if the majority is big, the message spreads nevertheless and more underground and uncontrollable ways.
Like almost all policy & law there are trade-offs. Good governance is about enacting policy which attempts to benefit as many people as possible on average (but there will always be losers).
People need to understand that issues are NOT black and white, and that "the thin end of the wedge" often needs to be broached in order to benefit wider society.
In general, freedom of expression, communication should not be curbed but that freedom also brings in misinformation, rumour, and anti-social activities. When panic can cause unnecessary destruction, government should be able to control communication channels for a short period of time. Remember, if government is wrong, it will not be able to hide the truth for a long.
As far as I know, this is the first time Snowden is directly penning an article. He even has a staff page [1] now on The Intercept. This is interesting because to me because "At the NSA I routinely came across the communications of New Zealanders in my work" is much more impactful than "Snowden stated that he routinely came across the communications of New Zealanders in his work as an NSA Analyst".
TIL that intermissions don't exist in a lot of countries. I always get pop-corns and coke during the second half.
No wonder the theaters often cut to black (for a break) at abrupt points during Hollywood films. A lot of Bollywood films on the other hand have well defined "half time" or intermission.
I agree with the conclusions in general, but it always makes sense to judge headphones by model than brand. My fav earphone is Sony MH1C. It used to be available in eBay for $30 and was the best you could buy the sub $100 category.
It's not just the raw numbers. I would love to move onto Telegram, which is more secure, has an API, and works from a desktop. But, I can't.
There are about five or six odd people in my life (professional or private) that I message frequently. Even if 1 out of them isn't on a particular messaging platform, I can't adopt that platform wholeheartedly. With Fb Messages, Hangouts and every other popular smartphone oriented messaging platform there would always be that one or two contacts that you regularly communicate with, who would be left out due to having an incompatible device. Whatsapp on the other hand works on pretty much every phone. When you want to replace something as prevalent as SMS, the long tail matters.
There's another tangible benefit of focusing on so many platforms. Whatsapp, which doesn't spend much (if anything at all) on promotion, is prominently featured in the advertisements of many budget phones, as manufacturers see Whatsapp support as a strong selling point.
Many old timers now work at Vivaldi. And even folks like Haavard left - https://opvard.wordpress.com/2015/04/21/goodbye-opera/