Username mentions in replies and multimedia attachments such as gifs, videos or photos will no longer count towards the limit of 140 characters.
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In a blog post, Twitter Senior Product Manager Todd Sherman confirmed that the microblogging site will give people a little more room to express their thoughts.
Twitter announced a number of sweeping changes that rethink its 140-character limit. The existing limits of four photos, or one video or GIF per tweet still apply. Soon, new tweets that begin with a @username will reach all followers, not just those shared between you and the @username account.
This feature was originally rumored by Bloomberg earlier this year. “In the coming months, we’ll make changes to simplify tweets including what counts toward your 140 characters”.
Instead, those posts Twitter believed to be of interest to users based on their activity are pushed to the top of the timeline. In recent months, Twitter has been trying to broaden its appeal to wider audiences to keep itself competitive with other social media networks, particularly Facebook and the newer, but super popular Snapchat. The changes all sound pretty great, so we hope the company doesn’t make us wait too long now that we know what’s coming down the pipeline. Previously, users would have to reply to a specific tweet if they wanted to add something to it. Before you’d have had to have added a period before the @ symbol to make this happen, now there’s no more need for said period. “(That means you’ll no longer have to use the “.@” convention, which people now use to broadcast tweets broadly). People will now be able to retweet themselves, in case they want a message to get more visibility down the line.
If you want all your followers to see a reply, you can Retweet it to signal that you intend for it to be viewed more widely. They mostly revolve around tweaking what counts toward the 140-character limit, as well as the ability to retweet yourself.
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But these are not the only changes Twitter is making.
