Twitter is finally beginning to distance itself from its strict adherence to the rule that tweets should only contain 140 characters. The company feels users need to do more through a tweet and that is why it has today that it will no longer be counting media attachments (like photos, GIFs, videos, and polls) and @names in replies toward your 140 allowed characters. Links will still however count.
So here is what the new updates mean: Twitter says it wants to make users have conversations via the platform easier and more straightforward. When replying to a Tweet, usernames will no longer count towards the 140-character. When you add attachments like photos, GIFs, videos, polls, or Quote Tweets, Twitter says that media will no longer count as characters within your Tweet. So this basically gives you more room for words.
Twitter has also enabled the Retweet button on user’s own tweets. This, according to them is to make users easily Retweet or Quote tweet yourself when you want to share a new reflection or feel like a really good one went unnoticed.
You will also no longer have to use the ‘’@’’ convention, which most people currently use to broadcast Tweets. 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. These changes, Twitter says will help simplify the rules around Tweets that start with a username.
These updates are expected to be available over the coming months. The company says it is making the announcement to notifying user and Twitter developers, so that everything works as it should when they roll these changes out.
‘’The updates have a significant impact on Tweets, so we want to provide our developer partners with time to make any needed updates to the hundreds of thousands of products built using Twitter’s API.’’
No timeframe has been given yet on when the updates will be rolled out but it will be interesting to see how users are going to react to this.
