140

Twitter users are stretching their wings in the new 280-character sky, and the result is a real mess. Maybe someday you’ll delight in Twitter’s logorrheic future, but right now you want your timeline to chill out a little. And what about when YOU tweet?! Now that your trusty character counter has been replaced by an inscrutable circle, how do you keep yourself from accidentally exceeding 140 characters, the proper maximum length for tweets? Twitter, we have to go back!!

Thankfully, Slate’s developers are here to save the day. Install our new Chrome extension, 140, and keep the horrifying world of 280-character Twitter at bay for a bit longer. If you’re visiting Twitter in Chrome, 140 will cut everyone’s tweets down to 140 characters. And better yet, 140 will restrict your tweets to 140 characters, too.

Is it perfect? Definitely not. We whipped it up in one night. URLs don’t always look great, and pasting text into a tweet can screw up your character count. But the result is nonetheless a much chiller experience on twitter dot com.

Eventually (in an hour?) Twitter will find a way to circumvent our extension, we’re sure. The army of progress marches forever forward, burning everything good in the world and salting the earth behind it. But for now, use Slate’s 140 to make Twitter great again.