Perhaps, to put a HN spin on it, we could discuss the fact that Twitter is apparently aware of the difference between unicode chars and bytes, but what about SMS? After all, that 140 character limit comes from SMS's limit. Does SMS treat ♺ as 1 against the 140 limit or 3?
In case anyone is interested, I just tested a bunch of UTF-8 Japanese characters in Twitter. It counts each character as 1 on the front-end (countdown from 140 to -infinity), but counts the BYTES on the backend, so the front end will say you are under the limit, but then you click update and get an error message saying you are over the limit.
The only point I see is that it looks neat. And it seemed to be an emerging meme today on Twitter, so I posted it. Already on the article I linked there are comments explaining why it doesn't make much sense (among others, it takes up 3 bytes instead of two for "RT").
So I guess it was an opportunity to witness the rise and fall of a meme within one day ;-)
Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer using "RT" as it's pretty easy to type, it's in popular usage on Twitter (so no need to explain the crazy recycling symbol), plus it's only one extra letter
Not just that, a lot of computer can't even display it correctly. Maybe twitter could auto-replace it with a small image of the sign, but that might break some twitter applications.
Fail. 'RECYCLING SYMBOL FOR GENERIC MATERIALS' (U+267A) is not generally available on platforms other than Mac OS X. On that platform it is only provided by the system font Apple Symbols (as a fallback) and versions of the included Japanese font Hiragino (what you're actually seeing). It is not included in Arial Unicode MS on Windows, which in turn is irrelevant as Arial Unicode MS is only included with Office, and (sigh) Mac OS X.
From looking at the Vista fonts I have available, it doesn't appear to be available there either. If it does work, I'd be curious to know what fonts it's provided by.
Let this be a lesson: Don't use weird Unicode characters unless you know that everyone that needs to see them can see them.
FWIW, if you can't stand the little blank boxes, here's a Free font set that covers most of Unicode: http://dejavu-fonts.org/
It may be one less "character" than RT, but it is one more byte in UTF-8. 0xE2 0x99 0xBA. What does twitter mean with the "140 character" limit, what's a character here? I mean, http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html was written in 2003.
It's probably telling that I can't get the character to display properly in any interface... but whether of the practicality of the suggestion, or the level of my char-fu, I'm not sure.
Under Linux you can enable the compose key, with setxkbmap -option "compose:rwin"
This lets you prefix digraphs with rwin, and have them print unicode characters. This is (to some extent) configurable, although I am not sure on the location of the mapping.
Nope, just little blocks. Some interfaces display it as one solid dark monolith, some as empty squares, and a special few as festive little glyphs with mysterious markings inside. (XP SP2, every browser under the sun and then some.)
This website is pretty useful: www.copypastecharacter.com
Just click on the symbol you want, and it's put on your clipboard. They just updated it today to support the ♺ symbol.
Stowe Boyd is showing his lack of a tech background here. The recycle symbol is 1 byte longer in UTF8 encoding and nobody on Windows can read it. I call Fail.
Too bad most of Windows users won't be able to see it correctly. And too bad those are the vast majority of Twitter users.
(And it's complicated to type in.)
lots of clients don't render unicode well. I think TweetDeck doesn't show the rest of the message after barfing on unicode, meaning instead of a retweet you'd just get a blank tweet. RT is standard
Aside from the dubious claim that this is "more distintive" can somebody explain the point to me?