It may seem counter-intuitive to keep counting links while no longer counting media, but Twitter‘s thinking is that not counting links against the character limit could open the door for spammy tweets with numerous links.
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That would be great news for Twitter, of course, which has struggled to get new users using the platform, and would certainly love people tweeting more often.
The biggest change comes to the way Twitter counts the length of tweets. Once the feature is switched on – the company hasn’t set an exact date – media attachments including photos, gifs, videos, polls and quoted tweets (basically, anything added to a tweet that isn’t a pasted-in link) won’t count towards the 140-character limit. “When replying to another user’s tweet, the “@username” at the beginning will disappear, allowing users to fit more text into their 140-character replies.
The changes also encourage people to share more content on Twitter and comes as the company has been investing heavily in video. This removes the need for the awkward construction in which users had to put a period or some other mark before a user’s handle if they wanted the tweet to be viewed more widely. The company announced the moves in a blog post Tuesday morning and said it will roll them out over the coming weeks and months.
“Users will also welcome the removal of the pesky “.@” convention. But the.@ is going to die, in form if not in spirit: Twitter will no longer hide tweets starting with an @ sign, unless those tweets are actually created with the reply function in the Twitter app.
This will increase the amount of space users have to express themselves.
Users have suggested these changes for years, but it apparently took the return to the chief executive seat of Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder, to provide the confidence to radically alter the service.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has acknowledged that Twitter must simplify its product and its message to attract new users and has made this a top priority since he rejoined the company full time in October. This will make having conversations on Twitter easier and more straightforward, no more penny-pinching your words to ensure they reach the whole group.
“One of the things we were hearing from [users] was that it was a frustration when a video or a photo or a GIF, or a handle in a reply was taking up some of their 140 characters, ” Dara Nasr, Twitter’s United Kingdom managing director, told WIRED. “We’re always exploring what we can do with the tweet and how we can make it better and make it more expressive”, he said.
“As long as things are fast, easy, simple and expressive, we’re going to look at what we can do to make Twitter a better experience”.
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Twitter conversations are also being changed.
