14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter is now helping you send slightly-longer messages by excluding the @username from your replies.
The update has been in the works for a while, as the company promised last fall that they were working on ways to let users express more with 140 characters.
Now, when you reply to someone or a group, those usernames won't count toward your tweet's 140 character limit, which is great news, because some people have impossibly-long handles and when there's more of them in a single reply, you barely get to say "hi."
From now on, the names of those you are replying to will appear above the tweet's text rather than within the tweet itself, giving you more room for conversations. If you want to check who's part of a conversation, you can easily tap on "replying to" and see all the names there. Furthermore, as Twitter points out, when reading a conversation, you'll see what people are saying, not just a lot of @usernames at the start of a tweet.
More to follow
Twitter says the new updates are based on feedback from users, as well as research and experimentation. Following their tests, the company found that people engage more with conversations on Twitter without all the usernames jumbled in a message.
"Our work isn't finished - we'll continue to think about how we can improve conversations and make Twitter easier to use," Twitter said.
The changes are rolling out on twitter.com, as well as the iOS and Android Twitter apps, so expect to see them soon on your own profiles.
This is quite a nice update to have, especially since so many people still complain about the 140 character limit. If the company has managed to keep these limitations until now, chances are it's never going to nix them because they've become a defining part of Twitter. Under the given circumstances, we'll just have to do what we need to meet the limit and cutting down on those @username wasted characters is ideal.