Editing 491: Twitter

{{comic
| number    = 491
| date      = October 20, 2008
| title     = Twitter
| image     = twitter.png
| titletext = If long tooltips / cut off for you / then upgrade from / Firefox 2 / Burma Shave
}}

==Explanation==
This comic plays off of an old shaving cream product's {{w|Burma-Shave}} advertising campaign employed on American highways from {{w|1925}} to {{w|1963}}. These ads used short poems, each line arranged sequentially on a sign along a highway, the last line always being "Burma-Shave," the name of the shaving cream. Originally, these ads only described the product, but others included driving safety messages. This notorious advertising gimmick could be considered an "ancient meme", having ended more than a decade before the term {{w|Meme|''meme''}} was even coined.

{{w|Twitter}} is a text-based social media service where posts are restricted in length (originally 140 characters, though the limit would be doubled to 280 characters from 2017 onward), so to get a longer essay sent, you will need to break it up in smaller fragments — like the {{w|Burma-Shave}} messages, although the whole of the text of this comic is considerably less than 140 characters and would not actually need to be broken up on Twitter. (Long after the release of this comic, Twitter would be {{w|Acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk|acquired by Elon Musk}} and later renamed to X. The platform is still commonly referred to as Twitter, though, including in {{w|Twitter|its Wikipedia article}}.)

[[Cueball]] gets five messages from Twitter on his device that give the following message: "On Twitter feeds - An odd regression: - Ancient memes - Find new expression - Burma-Shave." Thus the "ancient meme" of Burma-Shave advertisements is revived in the form of a broken-up Twitter thread.

{{w|Firefox 2}} had a long-standing annoying bug where only the initial part of the title text was shown as a tooltip, preventing you from seeing the rest of the text unless you right-clicked show-property, which would let you see a sideways scrollable field of the title-text in the properties for the image.

This bug is also still mentioned in [https://xkcd.com/about xkcd.com's About page]:

{{Quote|<big>'''Why can't I read the whole comic mouseover text in Firefox?'''</big>

''They can be read with extensions like [https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1715/ Long Titles], or by right-clicking on the images and going to 'properties', then clicking and dragging to read the whole thing. This is a bug in [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id{{=}}45375 Firefox, Mozilla Bug #45375]. It has been outstanding for many years now.

''Note: It looks like it's been fixed in Firefox 3.0. Now, as an added tweak, to keep the tooltips from expiring while you're reading, you can use [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11233 this].|[[Randall Munroe]]|[https://xkcd.com/about About xkcd]}}

==Transcript==
:[Cueball with a handheld device sits on an office chair.]
:Device: ''Beep beep''

:Device: On Twitter feeds

:Device: ''Beep beep''

:Device: An odd regression:

:Device: ''Beep beep''

:Device: Ancient memes

:Device: ''Beep beep''

:Device: Find new expression

:Device: ''Beep beep''

:Device: Burma-shave

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]