Twitter’s cramped 140-character will soon feel roomier.
The platform announced several tweaks today to how people use it, including the ability to let people cram more characters in a tweet since URLs, pictures and GIFs won’t be counted toward the 140-character limit, in an attempt to make Twitter less confusing.
The changes, which will roll out within the next few months, are as follows:
The “.@” format is gone: Soon, when sending a tweet to someone their followers might not follow, people won’t have to preface it with the clunky “.@” syntax at the beginning.
Twitter is refining the reply process: It will stop counting “@names” at the beginning of the tweet as part of the 140 character limit, giving people more space to reply.
More room for media: Pictures, links, videos, polls and other multimedia features also won’t be counted as part of the 140 character limit.
You can now retweet yourself: Twitter is adding a new Retweet button to your own tweets so “when you want to share a new reflection or feel like a really good went unnoticed.” Sure, like that’s not going to be abused.
The changes don’t compare to the rumored 10,000-character limit that was rumored several months ago. Also, the changes reflect CEO Jack Dorsey’s attempt in making Twitter easier to use for regular people since growth has stalled and its sock has dipped. Under his purview, he’s rolled out Moments, an algorithm timeline and revamped direct messages.
More in Media
Here are the biggest misconceptions about AI content scraping
An increase in bots scraping content from publishers’ sites represents a huge threat to their businesses. But scraping for AI training and scraping for real-time outputs present different challenges and opportunities.
How Future is using its own AI engine to turn deeper engagement into ad dollars
Future is betting on AI to boost recirculation – and make that stickier audience more appealing to advertisers.
Substack’s video bet could be a growth hack for small creators
Video is helping smaller creators on Substack grow their subscriber numbers faster — but larger creators aren’t experiencing the same boost.