Twitter Makes Big Changes To 140 Character Limit

Twitter started off with a pretty simple premise. You get 140 characters to say whatever you want to the world. You could tweet at specific people, or just put your thoughts out there for all to see. Since its launch, it's slowly evolved to include Tweeting video, photos, and more. Currently, all of these extras eat into your character count, but not for long.

Since the whole idea of using Twitter is to communicate within a certain character limit, it's always seemed a little silly that certain things would cut into that limit. That's why Twitter has announced some big changes, which should free up a few extra letters for you to use in your conversations.

There are two main categories that will no longer count toward your 140 character limit. These are media attachments, and usernames in replies. The media attachments are pretty simple. If it's a photo, video, gif, poll, or a quoted Tweet, it will not count toward the limit. If you're replying to a Tweet, then the usernames of the people you're replying to will not count. This is especially great for those long Twitter conversations where four or more people are being replied to. Regardless of how many people are in the conversation, you'll still have all 140 characters to work with.

Character limit changes aren't the only things that the company is working on. You'll soon be able to Retweet your own Tweets, and Quote Tweet yourself.

Changes are also coming to the .@ function. Namely, it is being removed entirely. If you start a tweet with @username, it will be seen by all of your followers. You can then Retweet responses, if you want them to get more visibility.

For the most part, these are all some great changes. Personally, I would have liked to see them remove links from the 140 character limit. However, it's nice to see the changes that they are making, which will let us make the most of our Tweets. While Twitter hasn't given an exact timeline for these changes, they expect to roll them out sometime in the coming months.

Source: Twitter