Twitter Updates Policies

Twitter lets you say more with the same charcter limit

Twitter Inc. is making a major shift in how it counts characters in Tweets, giving users more freedom to compose longer messages. It’s expanding the number of things you can post in a 140-character tweet, without expanding the number of characters.

It plans to do so within the next few months, usernames, quoted tweets, photos, and other media attachments will no longer count against the tweet’s 140-character limit.

It’s a step in a larger plan to give users more flexibility on the site. Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey said in January that the company was looking for new ways to display text on Twitter, and would experiment based on how people use the service. For example, some people tweet screenshots of longer text in articles, or send many tweets one after the other to tell a story.

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Twitter’s 140-character limit was originally adopted because it was a way to send Tweets while fitting all the information within a mobile text message — a common way to post when the service debuted in 2006, before the proliferation of smartphones.

Now Twitter will adapt in the following ways:

  • 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.

To commemorate that, we’ve highlighted a few memorable first tweets.

(Come on, Don’t Give us that look, we obviously had to add ours too)

Follow Us on Twitter Too 🙂

We look forward to these much awaited changes.

 

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