Photos, GIFs Excused from Twitter’s 140-character Limit

Today, Twitter announced   that there will be a change in 140 characters tweets pattern. These modifications will exempt certain features, including media attachments such as photos, Graphics Interchange Format(GIFs), videos and polls, the @names in tweet replies, from counting towards that limit.

These updates will be available over the coming months. Today, we are notifying you and our developers, so that everything works as it should when we roll these changes out. The updates have a significant impact on Tweets, so we want to provide our developer partners with time to make any needed updates to the hundreds of thousands of products built using Twitter’s API, the microblogging company said in a blogpost.

Other changes to expect in the coming months include:

·    Replies: When replying to a Tweet, @names will no longer count toward the 140-character count. This will make having conversations on Twitter easier and more straightforward, no more penny-pinching your words to ensure they reach the whole group.

·         Media attachments: When you add attachments such as photos, GIFs, videos, polls, or Quote Tweets, that media will no longer count as characters within your Tweet. More room for words!

·   Retweet and Quote Tweet yourself: The Retweet button on your Tweets will be enabled, so you can easily Retweet or Quote Tweet yourself when you want to share a new reflection or feel like a really good one went unnoticed.

·         Goodbye, .@: These changes will help simplify the rules around Tweets that start with a username. New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That means you will no longer have to use the”.@” convention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) 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.

Twitter assures users they will get more from their Tweets, saying “We are exploring ways to make existing uses easier and enable new ones, all without compromising the unique brevity and speed that make Twitter the best place for live commentary, connections, and conversations”.