Earlier this year, Twitter announced that it would be making changes to the way Tweets are composed, allowing for slightly longer messages when replying to other users and adding media attachments without impacting on the amount of characters you have left. Now, The Verge says it can confirm that Twitter will roll out the new character length rules next Monday, September 19.
Speaking about the new changes to the 140 character limit, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, said:
“This is the most notable change we"ve made in recent times around conversation in particular, and around giving people the full expressiveness of the 140 characters. I"m excited to see even more dialogue because of this.”
Back in May, Senior Product Manager Todd Sherman said that the changes being made by the company simplify what counts toward the 140 character limit of a Tweet. Here"s what"s changing:
- Replies: When replying to a Tweet, @names will no longer count toward the 140 character limit allowing for easier conversations with other users.
- Media attachments: Photos, GIFs, videos, polls or Quote Tweets won"t count as characters within a Tweet.
- Retweet and Quote Tweet yourself: This will allow you to Retweet your own messages if you feel like a good one went unnoticed.
- Removal of .@: New Tweets that begin with a username will be broadcast to all of your followers meaning that the .@username convention is no longer needed. If you want a reply to be seen by your followers you will be able to Retweet it to signal that you intend for it to be viewed more broadly.
At this stage, it is unclear whether all of these features will be pushed out to users in one go next Monday, or whether they"ll be pushed out incrementally to a small number of users to test how well each feature works.
Source: The Verge