Earlier this year, Twitter confirmed that it will stick to its trademark 140-character limit for tweets.
However, in May, the company has confirmed that it plans to change the way these 140 characters will be counted. They did not announce the date as to when the changes will be implemented. The latest report reveals that Twitter will start to put the new changes for the 140-limit characters into action from this September 19. Sometime back in May, Twitter had made a general announcement regarding the new changes. Apart from that, it also notified the developers that the updates would be available in the upcoming months.
New Changes to 140-Character Limit in Tweets
Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has been using its signature 140-character restriction for each tweet. Earlier this year, there were reports suggesting that the microblogging site might be planning to eliminate the 140-character limit completely. However, the company’s CEO made it clear that the character limit is not going anywhere. Still, Twitter is exploring ways to let people express themselves in a better way and is making additional plans to make the already existing features easier and also enable new ones.
There are quite a few changes that have been introduced to the tweets. It is all worth mentioning as they contribute a lot more now to the 140-characters giving more room for conversations. However, the links will eat up almost 23 characters.
No More Counting of @usernames
With the new changes, Twitter will no longer count the usernames while replying to tweets in the 140-character count. This will allow easy conversations with other users.
Media Attachments
Apart from the usernames, the tweets will also not be counting the media attachments like GIFs, images, polls, videos, or even quote “Tweets” as characters within your tweet.
Retweet or Quote Yourself
Apart from the changes mentioned about the characters limit, Twitter also plans to enable a button for “Retweet” action that will be present on the user’s own tweets. This retweet button will allow retweeting or quoting of tweets, which is very useful when the users feel that some good piece of information went unnoticed.
Removing the “@” Handle
The new tweets which begin with a username will be broadcasted to all the users’ followers, which mean that the “@username” action is not needed any longer. So if the user wants the reply to a tweet to be seen by the followers, then the user will have to Retweet it to a signal which will allow the reply to be viewed better and publicly.
Twitter had announced the new format back in May, wherein it had claimed that by bringing the new changes to the tweets will make conversations easier and straightforward on the platform. According to a Verge report, two people who are aware of the company’s business said that the plans for rolling out the updates could change. Unfortunately, Twitter has declined to make a public comment and has not yet revealed a release date for the new updated changes to the tweet characters limit.
However, it is not clear whether all the updates and changes will be released next week itself or if the changes will roll out slowly one after the other. There are also reports claiming that the changes might be released first to a small number of users to test how well the updates and changes work. The feedback can be then taken into account to make further changes before releasing the final updated product to the whole world.