Twitter will start charging $5/month, Reveals “Twttr” A Consonant Only FREE Alternative

Everyday more and more people turn to Twitter basically because it’s more organized and less cluttered unlike Facebook. Well, the bad news is that they will start to charge $5/month next month. It’s a shocking announcement but we can’t really do much about it. Check out the full story below.

Fortunately, even though Twitter decided to shift to a premium type of service, they will still continue to provide a completely FREE service called “Twttr”.

What’s with “Twttr”?

If you haven’t noticed it, it’s basically Twitter but without the ability to use vowels. According to Twitter, “We’re doing this because we believe that by eliminating vowels, we’ll encourage a more efficient and “dense” form of communication. We also see an opportunity to diversify our revenue stream.” That being said, they’re somehow forcing its users to upgrade to the premium Twitter if they want to express their thoughts clearly.

No more A, E, I, O, and U in the Tweets – Sorry

Now that we’ll be moving on to Twttr, vowels are no longer prohibited. You cannot type the said letters if you’re not a premium user but if you’re a bit skilled on finding solutions, you’ll realize that you can use (zero) “0” as a replacement for “o” and so on. There are other alternatives for other vowels too, but it will take time to get used to it. You can also opt to use “Y” to replace your vowels whichever you like. The vowels on the URLs will remain to be free , forever. Other languages like Korean, Chinese, Arabic, and Japanese will remain unaffected as they are non-Latin characters.

Longer Tweets will now be available

Longer tweets will now be available as the elimination of vowels will give more room for other characters. In case you only need a single character to finish up your tweet but you already reached the 140-character limit, you can conveniently add another one provided that you will pay the FEE for that character. The price of each character is determined on a bidding system and how popular the letter is.

Twttr now rolling out

Twttr will begin to roll out on a small percentage of users over the next few days and will gradually grow to 100%. All users will be migrated to Twttr unless you upgrade to the premium Twitter service. If I were you, I’ll start to practice using only consonants. This is really a shocking announcement especially with the recent news that YouTube is shutting down today.

To make the transfer hassle-free, Twitter decided to create a page which will automatically convert your tweet to Twttr format. I’ve tried it and it worked pretty well. Give it a try here!

@twitter : Vysyt ys yt www.N0yp1G33KS.c0m! @noypigeeks

— Adam Carlo Parnala (@adamparnala) April 1, 2013

What do you think? Will you still use Twitter even if it costs $5/month? Or will you go back to Facebook, or somewhere else?

Follow us on Twitter: @NoypiGeeks and @adamparnala.