Morning Tech Crawl: Longer Tweets on the way? Plus self-driving trucks and Waze ride-sharing
Good morning, Austin! Here's what's happening in the tech world today.
Twitter users may finally get their wish -- according to a report in Bloomberg, the social media company is planning a major shift in how it counts characters in posts. With the change, Twitter would stop including photos and links in character counts, giving users more freedom to compose longer messages. (Links currently take up 23 characters, even after Twitter automatically shortens them.) No response from Twitter yet.
Speaking of Twitter, the company has added Debra Lee, chairman and CEO of Viacom's Black Entertainment Television, to its board. As TechCrunch points out, Twitter has repeatedly been dinged over its lack of diversity, both within its workforce, and earlier, on its board. Since Jack Dorsey took the helm as CEO last fall, the company has been working to change that.
Otto, led by 15 former Google engineers, is targeting long-haul freeway driving that dominates the commercial trucking industry, according to the New York Times. While self-driving cars are likely years away, Otto engineers think that automating trucks could be a speedier route, both in financial and in regulatory terms.
Could Uber and Lyft have some new competition? On Monday, Waze, the Google-owned navigation app, said it was testing a carpooling service in San Francisco. Recode reports that the company's pilot involves 25,000 employees of select companies that commute from the city to the South Bay. After downloading a Waze app, workers can catch rides with drivers using Waze and pay them through the app.
