14 DAY TRIAL // Exactly one week ago, rumors surfaced that Twitter might be thinking of dropping links and images from a tweet's maximum 140-character limit. Today, Twitter has made it official.
In a blog post published a few hours ago, Twitter's product manager explains how these changes will affect user tweets. According to the company, the following elements won't longer count when you add them to a tweet or a reply-tweet: photos, GIFs, videos, polls, or quote tweets.
These usually took away around 23 to 25 characters off your tweet and made it difficult to have meaningful conversations on the social network.
Additionally, @user_mentions in reply tweets will no longer count towards the 140-character limit as well, but only in reply tweets, not regular tweets.
You can now retweet yourself
The changes don't stop here, though, and Twitter says they'll also enable the Retweet button for your the user's own tweets. Technically, this would allow users to unearth older tweets much more easily, without having to retype the whole message and resending it.
Furthermore, the company has also decided to change how tweets are handled. Until now, starting a tweet with @username showed the tweet only to that user alone. These tweets didn't show up on your Twitter timeline, and users had to access the "Tweet & replies" tab to view them.
If you wanted the tweet to show up to everyone, you had to use the ".@username" convention.
Twitter has changed this as well, and the company says that all tweets that start with @username will show up to all people by default.
More changes to come
"This will make having conversations on Twitter easier and more straightforward, no more penny-pinching your words to ensure they reach the whole group," said Todd Sherman, Twitter Senior Product Manager.
These changes will go live in the following months, and Twitter has only confirmed last week's rumors so that developers can update their apps in advance.
Additionally, the company has also promised more changes regarding its 140-character limit in the coming months, all with the purpose of making room for more conversations.
