I am reminded of the famous piece by Mark Twain, in which he proposes how to simplify the English language. Some of the rules he came up with resemble what today's youth do when communicating with each other in casual settings.
And I think that is the key here, the context in which one is communicating. It is perfectly acceptable to condense your thoughts to fit within a character limit, by whatever means necessary, provided your abbreviations can be understood by those you are communicating with.
I think it only becomes a real issue when those abbreviations pop up where they are not understood, not considered the norm, and do not fit into the writing style one would expect in the given situation.
An example would be how the name DonationCoder is abbreviated on that community's forum or within their chatroom, as simply DC. We, the members understand that, but to an outsider in another setting, they might mistaken DC to mean Washington, DC, so one has to be careful not to use that type of abbreviation in settings where the meaning isn't so obvious.
Another example is how Friendfeed users abbreviate their community name to just FF, which on Twitter could be mistaken to mean Follow Friday, or in another setting could even be mistaken to mean the Firefox browser.
I do not believe that some day we will be reading long news articles where everything is abbreviated like an SMS message. The kids of today do not turn in their homework written in this manner, because they understand the time and place for such language, and that isn't when there are no restrictions on length or one is expected to express oneself to a certain standard.
I believe the people that use such abbreviations are a lot smarter than other people give them credit for. For one, they know how to effectively communicate within the restrictions of any given technology. This does take some thought. It goes against everything they have been taught is correct. They not only invent their own form of the English language, they are also quite good at deciphering it, too, and within the context in which it is expressed.
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And I think that is the key here, the context in which one is communicating. It is perfectly acceptable to condense your thoughts to fit within a character limit, by whatever means necessary, provided your abbreviations can be understood by those you are communicating with.
I think it only becomes a real issue when those abbreviations pop up where they are not understood, not considered the norm, and do not fit into the writing style one would expect in the given situation.
An example would be how the name DonationCoder is abbreviated on that community's forum or within their chatroom, as simply DC. We, the members understand that, but to an outsider in another setting, they might mistaken DC to mean Washington, DC, so one has to be careful not to use that type of abbreviation in settings where the meaning isn't so obvious.
Another example is how Friendfeed users abbreviate their community name to just FF, which on Twitter could be mistaken to mean Follow Friday, or in another setting could even be mistaken to mean the Firefox browser.
I do not believe that some day we will be reading long news articles where everything is abbreviated like an SMS message. The kids of today do not turn in their homework written in this manner, because they understand the time and place for such language, and that isn't when there are no restrictions on length or one is expected to express oneself to a certain standard.
I believe the people that use such abbreviations are a lot smarter than other people give them credit for. For one, they know how to effectively communicate within the restrictions of any given technology. This does take some thought. It goes against everything they have been taught is correct. They not only invent their own form of the English language, they are also quite good at deciphering it, too, and within the context in which it is expressed.