Ever since its launch years ago, Twitter has been known rather well for a particular feature of its service – the 140 character limit imposed on users when sending out tweets. As long as Twitter has been available, links and photos that were posted in tweets had counted as part of that limit, but in a report today Twitter has announced that they would no longer be counting photos and links as part of the 140 character limit, opening up just a little bit more room for users to get the word out on whatever it is they’re sharing.
This is especially good news for publishers and anyone else with a large following who relies on Twitter to put out content, as tweets from these types of users will often contain both photos and links. These changes are expected to be rolled out to the service over the next couple of weeks, although Twitter has not yet officially made the details about the changes public so there is no confirmation on an exact time frame. While there will still be a little bit of wait before the changes are made, the change is likely to be one that is a smart move for the company, who has been tweaking bits and pieces of the service to increase user engagement.
Earlier this year back in January, a rumor hit the web stating that Twitter was looking to essentially remove the character limit from Tweets by raising the number of characters that users could inject into the post from 140 to 10,000. Although it took a couple of months, Twitter’s current CEO, Jack Dorsey, mentioned back in the middle of March that the rumored character limit removal was just that, a rumor, and that the character limit will stay at the 140 characters it has always been. Although the limit remains, not counting links and photos is certainly a way for Twitter to give some users the ability to increase what they can post, and no matter how long it may take for them to roll out the change, it’s one that plenty of Twitter users will likely appreciate.