Twitter is making important changes to its 140-character limit, and ditching the terrible ‘.@mention’ feature

It’s true: Twitter is making changes to its 140-character limit, and links to media and @replies will no longer count against the cap. That pesky .@mention is also a thing of the past.

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It’s important to distinguish straight away that @replies will no longer count toward your 140-character limit. An initial tweet with @mentions still does.

Twitter hopes this will help people engage more, and have more meaningful dialogue. In chains with several people mentioned, replies get increasingly shorter until the discussion dies off.

On Tuesday morning, Twitter made a major announcement via blog post— running 2,465 characters long according to WordCounter.net — that it will soon loosen its 140-character limit somewhat to make it easier for users by changing what counts against the character limit.

“When replying to a Tweet, @names will no longer count toward the 140-character count,” the microblogging service explained. The same will be true of media attachments in tweets like “photos, GIFs, videos, polls, or Quote Tweets.”

Additionally, perhaps the most confusing and misused convention of the Twittersphere will soon be a thing of the past.

“New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers,” Twitter explained, adding, “(That means you’ll no longer have to use the “.@” convention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) If you want a reply to be seen by all your followers, you will be able to Retweet it to signal that you intend for it to be viewed more broadly.”

Reaction on Twitter was mixed.

“Twitter didn’t change anything for way too long. These changes are much needed and great news,” cheered Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post

Twitter is making a series of changes that will affect how people tweet, how much they can fit in a tweet, and who will see it when they do. The company announced the moves in a blog post Tuesday morning and said it will roll them out over the coming weeks and months.

WILL OREMUS

Will Oremus is Slate's senior technology writer. Email him atwill.oremus@slate.com or follow him on Twitter.

First, as some had anticipated, media attachments such as photos and videos will no longer count against the 140-character limit for a tweet. Allowing people to add images for free (so to speak) should encourage the continuation of a trend that has turned Twitter from a text-heavy platform to one nearly as visual as rival social media services such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. It’s growing increasingly rare to see a tweet that’s text-only, and this will make it rarer still. 

However, contrary to the Bloomberg report that predicted this change, links to articles or other web pages will still count against the 140-character limit, just as they do today. 

The second change is that replies to another Twitter user will no longer begin with that user's Twitter handle. As a result, the handles of the people you're replying to will no longer count against the 140-character limit, either. Instead, Twitter will indicate in small text above the tweet that it is a reply and will note the name of the person you're replying to. This should help solve the Twitter canoe problem, in which the names of the users you’re talking to take up so much space that you can barely say anything. That is, unless you think the real problem is the very existence of Twitter canoes, in which case, this change will exacerbate it by making multiparty conversations more feasible. 

Google to jury: Android was built with our engineer's hard work

Android is precisely the kind of thing that fair use was intended to encourage.

SAN FRANCISCO—Google lawyer Robert Van Nest delivered a spirited defense to Oracle's accusations to a jury on Tuesday, telling them that Android was no shortcut—it was built with sweat and hard work.

"Google engineers spent several years and hundreds of millions of dollars to create Android using Google know-how," he said. "They created a brand new platform for innovation in smartphones and tablets that was beyond anything any of us had ever seen before."

Van Nest's strategy centered on a few key points. First, the Java language was open and free to use—a gift from creator Sun Microsystems to the world, he said. Sun wanted developers to take up Java and teach it in universities and schools.

As for the copyrighted APIs, they were a tiny part of the language. The 11,000 lines of code they represent are "less than one-tenth of one percent" of the 15 million lines of Android code. Later in his statement, Van Nest compared the code to the labels on a filing cabinet.

He also said Google's use of the Java APIs was "transformative," a key element in deciding a fair use case. Google used APIs from Java 2 Standard Edition, made for desktops, and combined them with 130 Android API packages to make a mobile operating system. "That's the software that runs your smartphone—the full stack, the whole thing," Van Nest said. Java's mobile edition was too weak to support smartphones.

Even more important, Sun and its then-CEO Jonathan Schwartz never objected to Google's use of Java or the APIs—and in fact celebrated them. Schwartz was a witness supporting Google during the 2012 trial, and he'll be back supporting Google again in this one.

Two views of the history of smartphones

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GOOGLE TOOK OUR PROPERTY—AND OUR OPPORTUNITY, ORACLE TELLS JURY

"If that code wasn’t in their three billion phones, not one would work."

It wasn't just Schwartz who praised Google. Van Nest played for the jury video from a 2009 presentation in which Oracle CEO Larry Ellison celebrated Android and its use of Java, saying he was "excited" and "flattered" by the use. "We’ll see lots of Java devices, some of them coming from our friends at Google," Ellison said in the video.

While Oracle described the history of smartphones as one in which Android robbed Oracle of its opportunities, Van Nest had a starkly different narrative. Android and Google had simply succeeded at a task where Oracle and Sun had failed: to build a robust operating system that could power modern smartphones.

Just as Oracle's lawyer relied on internal Google e-mails and documents, Van Nest had a few of his own.

"Our mobile java strategy is failing," read one Oracle document that he flashed on the screen. Another complained of "very limited internal expertise to make smart decisions" in the mobile space.

"Mr. Ellison figured out that he couldn't use Java to build a smartphone, and it was too late to partner with Google," Van Nest said. "That's when this claim first arose. That's when this lawsuit started."

Oracle's use of Google documents was more revisionist history, Van Nest said. They had highlighted discussions about licensing Java at Google, and Van Nest acknowledged the negotiations broke down.

But Java was licensing much more than APIs. Google could have gotten its brand, its implementing code, and much more. That's what was done by the many licensees Oracle had highlighted, like Sony, Motorola, and Nokia.

If Google had gone that route, it could have thrown together a mobile system in early 2006. Instead, it took a year and a half of engineering work to create Android from the ground up.

"Google did this themselves, and they did it the right way," said Van Nest. He continued:

Android is precisely the kind of thing that fair use was intended to encourage. It’s a leap forward to a new platform in a new market. It has allowed innovation by lots and lots of other people—developers and wireless carriers. It's become a whole community, because Google made it open and free. Now Mr. Ellison wants to shut it down and put it in his pocket. That is not fair, not right, and not what copyright was intended to allow.

In a few weeks, it will be up to a jury to decide between the two competing narratives. Google's first witness will be former CEO Eric Schmidt, who will take the stand shortly.

Virtual reality will revolutionize media content but VR headsets need to evolve

Virtual reality can deliver on its promise to bring new and immersive experiences to the masses, but the current iteration of hardware will need to evolve first.

That’s the view shared by NextVR co-founder Dave Cole and Shanna Tellerman, co-founder and CEO of Modsy, two VR industry veterans who took to the stage atTechCrunch Disrupt New York to dig into the development of this much-hyped but potentially transformative medium.


Tellerman’s company, which raised $8 million in February, enables users create a fully virtual version of their home for the purpose of testing out interior design styles or decor. That’s quite unlike the typical content associated with VR — such as games, sports or even pornography — and Tellerman believes it will take some time for VR to permeate beyond the typically white male users who own early versions of the hardware right now.


“The reality is that most consumers who [could benefit the most] don’t have VR in their living room yet. We have incredible technology in the background, and we’re designing every home so that, when VR hits, we can take advantage of it,” she said.


NextVR, which recently closed a $30.5 million Series A round, has struck deals with LiveNation and already covers a range of sports including the Kentucky Derby and select NBA matches. Plenty of new features are in the pipeline, including positional tracking and movement, but Cole admitted he wants to expand his company’s range of programming.


“Content for a broader audience is a tricky issue, [we’re focused on] very pronounced silos right now. It takes critical mass, you have to hang that [content push] on [VR reaching a] critical mass,” he explained.


But, for those that experience, there will be no turning back. “Once you’ve had that experience, anything else will feel like watching video in a fish bowl,” Cole added.





Aside from time, Tellerman and Cole both believe a new kind of hardware experience is needed. Fixed home VR is showing the potential for virtual reality and augmented reality content experience, but it is costly, unwieldy and uncomfortable. That’s kept it to a limited early demographic.


“We’re all very hesitant to put things on our face. The trend needs to start with trendy people… starting it in Silicon Valley… maybe sometimes works,” Tellerman joked. “Form factor needs to be something that hits the mark.”


“Form factors will need to change before it becomes mainstream,” Cole said in agreement.


The NextVR founder shared his belief that LG’s lightweight VR headset, LG 360 VR: a prototype of which was announced earlier this year, is the type of device that can move virtual reality into new kinds of audiences beyond early adopters. He also mentioned Microsoft’s HoloLens, which has shown early promise and has more than 1,000 engineers working on its development.
 


“I think there’s a step beyond [headsets, whether it’s in our phone or our eyes, it won’t be a set of goggles sitting in our home,” Tellerman mused.


Both executives believe that VR is poised to be a genuine breakthrough, and not fall dead on its hype like 3D TV did.


“3D TV was a very small value add to the television experience,” Cole, whose company was involved in TV, explained. “VR engages your entire visual system in a way that 3D never did, [it is] immersive beyond anything that was possible… even an iMax theater.”


“3D goggles might [fail], but VR content creates a different level of immersion, it feels like we’re creating amazing businesses,” Tellerman said in agreement.