How many characters does it take to communicate?
Recently, overstock.com took stock of the brevity of their url and said, can we do better? Now, overstock.com is o.co. It used to be an economy of words. Now it’s an economy of characters.
Did you ever envision a world where “.com” was too long? What will we do when TLAs (three letter acronyms) take too long?
And what happens when we no longer use words to communicate? When I is all that is left? When 1 isn’t the loneliest number, but 1/2 is? But wait a minute…1/2 is in substance shorter than 1, but from a character count, it’s longer with 3 digits. Even “.5” is longer with 2 characters. Hmmmm.This is going to get interesting.
For more on what social media, brevity and newspeak (all credit due to George Orwell)…actually newtype…have done to how we communicate (in fact whether we communicate) come to the May Women In Technology (WIT) panel “OMG. Can U Succeed” by clicking here.
