Ditch Twitter's annoying new character-count circle with this Chrome extension

Go back to Twitter's classic number-based character count.
 By 
Jack Morse
 on 
Original image replaced with Mashable logo
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

The only constant is change ... unless you've got a handy Chrome extension fighting the tides of time, that is.

And thankfully for anybody who dislikes the recent changes to Twitter, "tiny-tweets" is just such an extension.

To the consternation of many, Twitter announced on Nov. 7 that all its users would henceforth be able to tweet with 280 characters. As a further blow to all the 140 diehards out there, the company removed the number-based character count from the bottom right of the "compose new Tweet" box and replaced it with a circle.

Essentially, Twitter seemed to be saying, even if you want to stick to 140 characters in your tweets, we're going to make it difficult for you. Twitter clearly thought it had it all figured out. Luckily, however, the San Francisco-based company's engineers didn't see Monica Dinculescu coming.

The Google developer and self-described "Emojineer" took it upon herself to do something about the dreaded circle, and created a Chrome extension that returns things to the more familiar number-based counter.

Dinculescu explained that she whipped the entire thing up "as a joke at like 1am the day before a talk and tbh didn’t think it would become popular?"

"The internet, man," she added.

Original image replaced with Mashable logo
Left: Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable
Right: Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

The internet indeed.

Importantly, tiny-tweets won't keep everyone else down to 140 — there's a different extension for that — but hey, "be the change" and all that.

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Jack Morse

Professionally paranoid. Covering privacy, security, and all things cryptocurrency and blockchain from San Francisco.

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