Twitter seems to be on a rampage of making attempts to bring changes to the 140-character limit constraints so that the users can say more, which will, in turn, make them happier.
Just a month ago, the social media giant had relaxed its 140-character limits restrictions by not counting the external website links, media items, and polls against the 140-character limit. At the same time, it even removed the usernames from being counted under the 140-character limit. Now, the company is going another step further by removing the usernames from the tweet replies in an attempt to give more characters for writing and to also clean up the tweets a bit. This feature of removal of usernames from the replies is still in the testing stages.
What’s New about the Change
The change which was first spotted by TechCrunch was confirmed later by Twitter. The company mentioned in a post that it is testing to remove the usernames from replies. Though the change is limited right now only to a few iOS users of Twitter, the social media giant is planning on rolling out the feature soon to all its users sometime very soon, though it had not clarified when it will be made available to the public. The post had a link that directed the users to a Twitter Help page for more information.
With this new change, a user can now freely mention any number of usernames without having to stress about the character limit or without having to see a bunch of overcrowding @usernames even if it is in a group conversation thread by completely avoiding the notorious ‘Twitter Canoe’ issue.
Twitter has been testing this new method of change to increase the characters in a very limited fashion to just a few users on a very limited number of devices starting with the iOS platform. The change is not yet available on the website version of Twitter or on Tweetdeck or on the other web apps. One important notable feature of this change is that the @username can be removed only from tweets that will be sent as a reply to another tweet, but not for fresh tweets which will have the @username. Twitter will not just be removing the @username from the character limit, but it will be actually omitting the whole @username part from the entire tweet. This could become a little awkward and confusing for the regular users who have been in the long-run practice of constantly mentioning the @usernames of the users in their tweets and replies.
The change can be seen when a snippet will be appearing with the ‘empty boxes’, right above the tweet replies which will read ‘In reply to ABC users and others (if any)’. There is every possibility that the users might get confused with such a vague statement not knowing if it is a fresh tweet or if it is a reply to the conversation of the already existing tweet. The ‘others’ part that is available in the snippet will open a list of users to whom the reply will be sent. The users can edit the other users who will be mentioned in the ‘others’ part of the snippet.
Twitter is putting in all its efforts and is constantly working towards reviving back the company’s position on the social media platform, at a point where it is hanging at the edge of the cliff to see a probable divestiture or an acquisition. Recently, there were reports that Disney, Google, and Salesforce are trying a bid at the company. However, the confirmed reports suggested that these firms have reportedly backed out from the race to acquire Twitter.