“These updates come in response to users wanting more photos, more videos and more conversation on Twitter”, said Rory Capern, managing director of Twitter Canada.
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With this change, you can share a photo and the link URL won’t eat up some of that 140 characters; the same goes for GIFs and video, as well as Quote Tweets and polls. But having a media file or a poll conducted there would count as a link is added for attaching it. Co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey helped fuel the speculation in a January tweet, saying, “We’re not going to be shy about building utility and power into Twitter for people”. To that effect, back in July the company reported not the best Q2 earnings, with just 3% user growth since the previous year.
Twitter’s finally gone ahead and done away with its iron-clad rules for the 140-character limit it’s been imposing since its inception. More specifically, Twitter will no longer take replies, media attachments, and usernames into account when tallying the 140 characters per tweet. This basically means that you can attach whatever you want and still have the full 140 characters at your disposal. Excluding them from the character count gives users an extra 23 characters to use for their message. It’s very unlikely Twitter will ever fully remove the character limit however, and any cap increase that does occur is expected to remain small. So that may roll out in the near future, as yet another way to expand the limit on Tweets. While the character limit for tweets remains unchanged from day one, the microblogging network is taking steps to enable users to get most out of what they already have.
On its support forum, Twitter cautioned that some tweets may appear to be cut off and replaced with URLs to mobile web addresses, and advised mobile users to upgrade to the latest versions of the Twitter app for Android and iOS.
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The announcement comes amidst a hard period for Twitter, as the company sees movement within its platform go stale despite adding a myriad of new features in recent times. Even quoting a tweet cost you characters.
