The Twitter Character Update Battle

Personally, we are happy to stick with 140-character count tweets.  Thank you, Twitter!  It is enough to read your Twitter feed as is as we are continuously bombarded with content good, bad, and ugly.  Twitter announced this week on May 24, that the 140-character count stays, but will stop counting media attachments and other content toward its iconic character limit!  Can we get a woot woot!?

Here is the skinny on how this will work courtesy of Twitter’s blog:

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 like 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: Twitter will be enabling the retweet button on your tweets, so you can easily tweet 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’ll 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.

Boo: Prior to the announcement there were reports that suggested URLs would get the same treatment as media attachments with this update. Twitter unfortunately left this feature out of the upcoming roll-outs. Though webpage links will continue to count, there’s still hope that this may not be a feature for long.

“In addition to the changes outlined above, we have plans to help you get even more from your tweets,” said Todd Sherman, senior product manager with Twitter, in the company’s blog post.

There’s no specific launch date for these features, but users should expect to see them “in the coming months.”

We look forward to seeing how Twitter evolves for us all!