Media attachments, such as photos, GIFs, videos and polls, will no longer count as characters against the limit.
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The change, announced Tuesday, is yet another attempt by the San Francisco company to make its messaging service easier to use and to attract new users.
For the first time, Twitter users will also be able to re-tweet themselves. As such, they wanted to give developer partners time to make any adjustments to products built using Twitter’s API.
Twitter announced a big update to the platform, easing their 140 character limit per tweet which might fundamentally alter conversations on the website. Twitter says if you want those tweets to be seen by all your followers, rather than use the ‘.@’ convention, just retweet yourself.
But the networking service will allow users to fit more into each message. So from now on the company will not count any multimedia content against the 140 character limit. These media will no longer count as characters within your Tweet.
Neither will the names included at the start of a reply, meaning that “canoes”, the conversations that grow to include an unwieldy number of people in one chain, will soon leave plenty of room for a full argument/conversation to unfold.
Twitter being Twitter, it quickly filled up with contrary opinions about what the changes will really mean.
“We’re not giving up on the idea of Twitter being in the moment”.
Twitter Inc. has struggled for years to find a cure for slow user growth. Earlier this year, they even introduced a change in the timeline introducing algorithmic “While you were away” tweets.
Another enhancement was making it easier to search accounts topic, location and people, leading to a 48% increase in follows and 56% in mutual follows.
Facebook has 1.65 billion users.
Nicky Danino, principal lecturer and social media expert at the University of the Central Lancashire, says the changes could be positive for the company.
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Twitter shares reached an intraday record low Tuesday after Michael Nathanson, an analyst at MoffettNathanson, said the company is less likely to be a takeout candidate, given declining interest from users and advertisers.
