Sometimes words are barely enough to express one’s feelings—it gets even worse if you a restricted on the number of characters to do that. While words like “I love you” and adios “amigos” are powerful enough to convey a true feeling—the same cannot be said when you have so much to pour out. Twitter finally bowed to popular demands and has officially announced that media attachments and @names in replies would no longer count toward your 140 allowed characters.
This confirms an earlier report that revealed that the microblogging company was working on breaking the 140-character limit. However, Twitter is sticking with the old rules where links are counted as characters—though, that decision is based on the company’s decision to make Twitter character more intuitive.
“In the coming months we’ll make changes to simplify Tweets including what counts toward your 140 characters, so for instance, @names in replies and media attachments (like photos, GIFs, videos, and polls) will no longer “use up” valuable characters.”
Breaking it down, new Twitter rule means characters you see in the composer interface should count, regardless of whether they are links. In a nutshell, you won’t see characters for pictures, GIFs, videos, Quote Tweets and polls. Your character count won’t change for images since they are no longer counted by Twitter in the composer.
To make conversation more attractive and interesting when replying to a tweet or a mention, Twitter has opted not to include @username to character count. This is particularly more interesting when more people join in a conversation—the new rule means there is no need to exclude @username (name of a user) when joining a conversation.
Twitter users—old and new are particularly frustrated at some of the unclear rules surrounding how they compose and send tweets. The microblogging company is determined to make using the service worth the while and more interesting. Of particular note is the previous rule where @ is included before your username to make a broadcast. In the new rule, you are no longer required to put the “@” sign before retweets. “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,” says Todd Sherman, Twitter’s Sr. Product Manager in a blog post on Tuesday.
Twitter has come a long way and is generally regarded by many as one of the most active social media websites. However, too many unclear and confusing rules continue to be the biggest challenges for users—new ones in particular. Rule or no rule, the microblogging company remains one of the biggest platforms for millions of people to tweet their views all day.
“One of the biggest priorities for this year is to refine our product and make it simpler,” said Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO and co-founder, in a statement made available to TechCrunch. “We’re focused on making Twitter a whole lot easier and faster. This is what Twitter is great at – what’s happening now, live conversation and the simplicity that we started the service with.”
Finally, you will now be able to retweet and quote your own tweets—a departure from what was obtainable in the past. Good thing is you will now be able to use Twitter as a platform to share your content, links and media.
To this end, the Retweet button will now be enabled on your own tweets so you can start sharing and quoting your tweets.
The new changes have not taken effect yet, but this won’t be long according to Twitter.
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