Twitter has confirmed that they’ll be making a few changes to let you fit more in a single tweet. Changes to retweeting and chatting with a user are also in the pipeline.
Earlier this month we told you Twitter would stop counting photos and links as part of the 140 character limit, but it looks like the social network is taking things a step further. Not only will URLs and photos no longer be a part of the character count, but they will also stop counting usernames.
Here’s Twitter’s full breakdown of the upcoming changes:
– Replies: When replying to a Tweet, @names will no longer count toward the 140-character count. This will make having conversations on Twitter easier and more straightforward, no more penny-pinching your words to ensure they reach the whole group.
– Media attachments: When you add attachments like photos, GIFs, videos, polls, or Quote Tweets, that media will no longer count as characters within your Tweet. More room for words!
– Retweet and Quote Tweet yourself: We’ll be enabling the Retweet button on your own Tweets, so you can easily Retweet or Quote Tweet yourself when you want to share a new reflection or feel like a really good one went unnoticed.
– Goodbye, .@: These changes will help simplify the rules around Tweets that start with a username. New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That means you’ll no longer have to use the ”.@” convention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) If you want a reply to be seen by all your followers, you will be able to Retweet it to signal that you intend for it to be viewed more broadly.
One or two of these additions may be controversial. For example, giving people the option to retweet themselves if “a really good one went unnoticed” sounds like a cheap solution to fix the issue of tweets not getting noticed. Why should it be upon the user to do something to get the tweet noticed? It’ll look obnoxious if we’re retweeting ourselves — it’s the equivalent of asking aloud, “Hey, did anyone just hear my excellent thought?” even when everyone heard it but purposely ignored it.
Twitter isn’t ready to launch these changes today because they want to give developers time to prepare. This way, third party apps like Tweetbot (It’s great — there are no ads in it!) will be ready to support Twitter’s new rules right at the start of the official launch. Expect to see these features in a few months.
Sadly, we’re still waiting for Twitter to launch an “edit” button. It sucks to be unable to fx a mistake.
Source: Twitter
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