Although Twitter users are still limited to 140 characters, new rules take effect today that will effectively lead to longer tweets in many cases.
Tweet lengths will still cap at 140 characters; what’s changing is that not everything will continue to count toward that limit. According to ABC News, sharing photos, animated GIFs, polls, and quoted tweets will not count toward the limit anymore, giving users more characters with which to express themselves in some instances.
By excluding photos and videos from the character count, users will get an additional 23 characters for their message. The quoted tweets could expand tweets even more.
Twitter announced the changes in its blog at the end of May to give developers time to get ready for the rollout that took effect today. Other modifications will be coming soon, including changes in how reply tweets are handled and possibly excluding a user’s Twitter handle from the character count.
Fortune reported that Twitter may have been considering a way to expand messages to 10,000 characters through links and an expanded Twitter card for content, but CEO Jack Dorsey wants to preserve the brevity of Twitter and has criticized these ideas, saying that “the majority of tweets will always be short and sweet.”
Although Twitter wants to be true to its commitment to brevity, the CEO also suggested that they may be putting structures in place to support screen shots. Currently, tweets can be embedded into an article or post by clicking “embed” and pasting in some code.
One reason for the changes is to attract new users and encourage more activity by existing ones, given that user growth has slowed recently.
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