A couple weeks ago, rumours started to swirl that Twitter was going to be making some changes to the way the 140-character limit was being handled in the popular social media service. The rumours suggested that video and photo attachment links wouldn’t count towards the limit, allowing more characters for actual content in each tweet. In a blog post yesterday, Twitter confirmed this would indeed be true, as well as adding a few more modifications that will free up even more characters.
- Replies: When replying to a Tweet, @names will no longer count toward the 140-character count. This will make having conversations on Twitter easier and more straightforward, no more penny-pinching your words to ensure they reach the whole group.
- Media attachments: When you add attachments like photos, GIFs, videos, polls, or Quote Tweets, that media will no longer count as characters within your Tweet. More room for words!
- Retweet and Quote Tweet yourself: We’ll be enabling the Retweet button on your own Tweets, so you can easily Retweet or Quote Tweet yourself when you want to share a new reflection or feel like a really good one went unnoticed.
- Goodbye, .@: These changes will help simplify the rules around Tweets that start with a username. New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That means you’ll no longer have to use the ”.@” convention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) If you want a reply to be seen by all your followers, you will be able to Retweet it to signal that you intend for it to be viewed more broadly.
Twitter is announcing these changes now, but won’t be rolling them out in order to give developers time to update their apps for when the changes come. Given the changes, there should be plenty more characters for users to more properly convey their message on Twitter.
Are you looking forward to being able to better utilize Twitter’s 140 character limit in the coming months? Let us know in the comments below, or on Google+, Twitter, or Facebook.
[button link=”https://blog.twitter.com/express-even-more-in-140-characters” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: Twitter[/button]
