Twitter's New "140" Rules Made Simple

Today Twitter updated rules on which bits of your tweet count towards the service's 140-character limit – there are new rules. This isn't like your old Twitter. This is a brand new dawn, a place where up is down and down is counted towards your limit – unless it has an @ symbol in front of it and was tweeted as a reply to another tweet. These rules and a whole lot more can be simple – we've gone ahead and made a list of rules for you.

Below you'll find the rules revealed by Twitter this morning – they wont be implemented for a while. Some may work as early as this afternoon, others might take months to begin to work. Twitter's developers and PR have not made any hard date promises beyond that they'll all be enacted some time this year – maybe inside this Summer.

The above super-simple tweets should make your whole understanding process easy peasy. Should these Tweets disappear for one reason or another, we've got them here below as well, in handy-dandy paragraph form.

First, your Your @names do not count towards your 140-character limit if they're at the start of your tweet. You are allowed to stack your @names when they appear in a reply tweet, as much as you want, as far as we know. Twitter will undoubtedly reveal the reply-@name limit at some point in the near future.

Non-reply tweets that start with a @name still count towards your 140-character limit.

Starting a tweet with @name will reach all of your followers. Before you'd have had to have added a period before the @ symbol to make this happen, now there's no more need for said period.

Attachment URLs do not count towards your 140 limit. Attachments are images, videos, and gifs. URLs pasted in a Tweet will still count towards your 140 limit.

Both Retweet and Quote Tweet features will be enabled for your own Tweets in the near future, allowing you to resurface old tweets and make new comments on them.

Sound like a good set of new rules to you? Let us know by replying to the tweets above or @SlashGear.