A defining characteristic of Twitter has always been its 140-character limit for tweets. Some people love this, while some simply wish the limit was slightly higher in order to create more detailed tweets. Beginning September 19th though, Twitter will be making a relatively big change to how the 140-character limit is handled.
Until now, images, GIFs, videos, polls, quoted tweets and more all counted towards the character limit, which ultimately led to many people feeling frustrated due to the fact that they couldn’t express themselves freely. Thanks to this change, though, users will now be able to express themselves without worrying about images, GIFs or other kinds of media counting towards the character limit. Aside from the mentioned changes, usernames will also no longer count towards the character limit when placed at the beginning of a reply.
These plans aren’t exactly new, though. The company originally announced the update back in May but hadn’t mentioned when they would integrate the feature with the service. According to The Verge, the date comes from a source familiar with the company’s plans. Once the changes start rolling out, it’s currently unknown if the company will introduce them simultaneously or if a certain type of media will start off the process with other ones being implemented later. Previously, the social media company has considered increasing the character limit beyond the current 140, but, ultimately, it decided in January to stick to its guns and keep the limit as it considered the feature as one that was defining of Twitter and set them apart from the competition.
The change to the social media platform comes at a time when the company is implementing new features and improving others. Earlier today the company announced its partnership with streaming service Deezer, which will see the French company join the likes of Spotify, iTunes and SoundCloud in being available through Twitter’s Audio Cards. Another change the company implemented recently was read receipts for Twitter DM’s, which allow users to see who has read their private messages. All of these changes come as the company is desperately trying to improve user engagement and revenue streams in order to stop its tumbling share prices, which haven’t been doing incredibly since the company went public.