The 140-character limit is iconic. It is a part of the identity that defines Twitter. The 140-character is here to stay, thankfully–at least for the time being–but you will soon be able to use more of those 140 characters to say what you need to say. According to a post from The Verge, Twitter will roll out changes on September 19 that will make more of that 140-character limit available for your actual message.
The Verge post states, “Beginning September 19th, the company will cut down on exactly which types of content count toward the platform’s 140-character limit. Media attachments (images, GIFs, videos, polls, etc.) and quoted tweets will no longer reduce the count.”
A Twitter spokesperson declined to confirm or deny the date, but The Verge cites two sources familiar with Twitter’s business in breaking the scoop on the launch of the new rules.
There has been rumor and speculation all year about impending changes to Twitter. At the beginning of the year a rumor circulated that Twitter might expand that 140-character limit to 10,000 characters. The actual visible tweet would still have been truncated—with a link to the remaining text—but 10,000 is an insanely ludicrous number of characters to convey a message.
Thankfully, that rumor proved to be false—or at least if it was true at some point, the powers that be at Twitter came to their senses and came up with a different plan. The changes expected to roll out on September 19 include no longer counting the characters used by media attachments—images, videos, polls—or quoted tweets against the 140-character max.
Twitter also stated that the @names in a reply will no longer be included against the 140-character limit, and you will now be able to quote and retweet your own tweets.
I am looking forward to these changes. It would be nice if URLs also no longer counted against the 140-character max, but I’ll take what I can get. By not counting the links for media attachments or @names in replies, it will be a lot easier to form a complete thought with 140 characters without resorting to complete text speak gibberish.
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