Twitter, on Monday, announced that the social networking website would be relaxing the rules on their trademark 140-character limit. Tweets will hold steady that limit but things like GIFs, images, videos, polls and quote tweets won’t be added to the count.
Twitter relaxes the 140-character limit
Twitter has always been known for the restrictive style of writing, which allows for a rather natural micro-blogging environment when compared to Facebook. While this change is subtle in many ways, it could lead to bigger changes that may threaten the unique identity of Twitter. Case in point, last year, Twitter had allegedly planned to roll out a 10,000 character limit, which was quickly suppressed due to the backlash, ironically, on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/twitter/status/777915304261193728?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
While the feature is still rolling out to all users in the coming weeks, users might notice that when replying to a tweet, the @handle at the beginning will no longer affect the number of characters that can be used. Replies will also be seen by all of your followers, and not just the ones who follow both. This finally ends the reign of a self-made hack which used .@handle to put the tweet onto the timeline.
Apart from this big change, the company is also developing a new method in which usernames of people you reply to will be omitted out of the tweet, in order to incorporate more characters in the same limit. All these revisions were initiated in May and have finally seen the light of day after a good 4 months. This gave developers ample time to play with the changes.
After these changes, we can also expect the ‘edit tweet’ option that has been long awaited by most users.
