Twitter has been continuously evolving since it started from a simple 140-characters text to rich content which includes photos, videos, hashtags, vines in the tweet. That means one can do a lot in a tweet but when a user adds a photo, video, a link, a poll or a username in a reply then it eats away the required space from the 140-characters limit. And the user has to somehow accommodate his message in already truncated limited characters available by cutting down full words. Now that’s going to change soon. Twitter is going to overhaul the 140-characters limit rule which will no longer consume the precious characters other than for your text message.
Changes coming to Twitter 140-characters rule
- When a user replies to Tweet, @username will no longer be counted towards the 140-characters count. This means no more penny-pinching your words to ensure the message reaches the whole group.
- Whenever a user inserts photos, videos, GIFs, polls or quotes tweets then these media will no longer be counted as characters within the Tweet. So one gets full 140 characters.
- The Retweet button on one’s own tweets will be enabled so you can easily Retweet or Quote Tweet yourself. So if you want to share or retweet your tweet which might have gone unnoticed, you can Retweet your own tweet.
- No more .@username, that is Twitter is simplifying the rules around Tweets that begins with a username. New Tweets that begins with a username will reach all your followers and one doesn’t have to use the .@ which the users use at present to broadcast it broadly. So any tweet that is not a reply to someone else’s tweet and begins with a username will be seen by all followers.
These changes have been notified to the developers so that everything works fine when it starts rolling out these changes.
Announcingt these important changes on the Twitter blog, Todd Sherman, Sr. Product Manager said
“The updates have a significant impact on Tweets, so we want to provide our developer partners with time to make any needed updates to the hundreds of thousands of products built using Twitter’s API….”
These updates will start rolling out in coming months. In addition to this, Twitter has plans to get even more from the Tweets and is working on it.
