Ever since its first days as a service, Twitter has limited users to just 140 characters in their tweets which can be taken up by usernames, photos, links, and more. This has become a pretty major issue to many users as including a simple picture in a tweet will take up nearly a third of available characters, therefore hogging the space needed to get all the words out of your head and on the internet. However, Twitter this year did confirm that they were expanding the way characters would be handled, but an exact date or time frame wasn’t mentioned. On the contrary, according to a new report by The Verge, the social media outlet may be launching these changes as early as next week.
Twitter is about to make a big change to the way that tweets work, The Verge can independently confirm. Beginning September 19th, the company will cut down on exactly which types of content count toward the platform’s 140-character limit. Media attachments (images, GIFs, videos, polls, etc.) and quoted tweets will no longer reduce the count. The extra room for text will give users more flexibility in composing their messages.
According to the publication, “two sources familiar with the company’s business” have confirmed to them that Twitter will be excluding pictures, usernames at the start of replies, GIFs, videos, polls, and more from the 140 character limit. This will make for more writing room and allow users to write longer tweets without expanding the 140 limit. This change is a must and has been for quite some time now, so thank God that it’s on its way.
The Verge notes that although it does seem like Twitter will be launching this change on September 19th, the social network’s plans may change suddenly. Of course, since we’re a week away, this seems rather unlikely, but keep in mind that anything’s possibly, especially since this is just a rumor at this point. Nevertheless, I’d probably bet on seeing this feature launch on the said date as it seems relatively likely Twitter’s about to make this move.
It’s worth noting that although users will be able to tweet more words when including pictures and stuff in their tweets, that doesn’t mean Twitter’s allowing more characters in your tweet. Essentially, only words will count as characters and pictures, videos, GIFs, and more won’t. For reference, usernames and links do count as characters unless the former is used at the beginning of a reply.
We’ll update you on whether Twitter does expand their 140 character limit as the magical date of September 19th approaches. Stay tuned to MBEDDED for further developments.
- SOURCE: The Verge
One Comment
You must log in to post a comment.