It’s true: Twitter is making changes to its 140-character limit, and links to media and @replies will no longer count against the cap. That pesky .@mention is also a thing of the past.
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It’s important to distinguish straight away that @replies will no longer count toward your 140-character limit. An initial tweet with @mentions still does.
Twitter hopes this will help people engage more, and have more meaningful dialogue. In chains with several people mentioned, replies get increasingly shorter until the discussion dies off.
On Tuesday morning, Twitter made a major announcement via blog post— running 2,465 characters long according to WordCounter.net — that it will soon loosen its 140-character limit somewhat to make it easier for users by changing what counts against the character limit.
“When replying to a Tweet, @names will no longer count toward the 140-character count,” the microblogging service explained. The same will be true of media attachments in tweets like “photos, GIFs, videos, polls, or Quote Tweets.”
Additionally, perhaps the most confusing and misused convention of the Twittersphere will soon be a thing of the past.
“New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers,” Twitter explained, adding, “(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.”
Reaction on Twitter was mixed.
“Twitter didn’t change anything for way too long. These changes are much needed and great news,” cheered Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post
Twitter is making a series of changes that will affect how people tweet, how much they can fit in a tweet, and who will see it when they do. The company announced the moves in a blog post Tuesday morning and said it will roll them out over the coming weeks and months.
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First, as some had anticipated, media attachments such as photos and videos will no longer count against the 140-character limit for a tweet. Allowing people to add images for free (so to speak) should encourage the continuation of a trend that has turned Twitter from a text-heavy platform to one nearly as visual as rival social media services such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. It’s growing increasingly rare to see a tweet that’s text-only, and this will make it rarer still.
However, contrary to the Bloomberg report that predicted this change, links to articles or other web pages will still count against the 140-character limit, just as they do today.
The second change is that replies to another Twitter user will no longer begin with that user's Twitter handle. As a result, the handles of the people you're replying to will no longer count against the 140-character limit, either. Instead, Twitter will indicate in small text above the tweet that it is a reply and will note the name of the person you're replying to. This should help solve the Twitter canoe problem, in which the names of the users you’re talking to take up so much space that you can barely say anything. That is, unless you think the real problem is the very existence of Twitter canoes, in which case, this change will exacerbate it by making multiparty conversations more feasible.
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