Twitter changes 140 character limit

Twitter announced yesterday that they will be making some changes to the character limit, confirming the rumours that were circulating last week. Thankfully they won’t be changing the limit itself, but rather extending it along with some other great new tweaks to features. These updates will be implemented over the coming months.

What changes are being made to Twitter?

Character Limit Extension
The characters in handles (@username) will no longer be counted in replies, meaning you can keep the conversation going with multiple people without having to cut down on what you want to say.

Attachments (photos, videos, GIFs, polls and quote tweets) will no longer be counted in tweets. So you can add media to make your tweet more visual while still having 140 characters.

Retweet Yourself
You’ll be able to retweet and quote tweet your own tweets (yay!), this will allow you to re-share something without having to create a new tweet!

Mention vs Reply
The rules for mentions vs replies are no more! Tweets starting with a username will no longer only be seen by those who follow both accounts. I explained this rule here, it was named the number one mistake that users make but now you’ll no longer need to add a character before a username at the beginning of your tweets for it to be seen by everyone on the timeline.

What about an edit Tweet button?

As a side note since I see this question a lot – they have said that they are looking into having an edit feature, but worry about the nature of tweets being changed after they have been embedded, shared and retweeted many times and perhaps causing issues and problems. It’s been suggested that the edit button only appears for a certain length of time and tweets that have been edited show a message, but nothing further has been said about this feature.

Do you like this update? Do you wish they got rid of the character limit?

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4 responses to “Twitter changes 140 character limit”

  1. Yaaay! Such great news that photos and media aren’t going to be included anymore, they would always take such a large chunk of the tweet up haha. Thanks for this info, as annoying as it is to make an error in tweets, I totally understand why it would be problematic though, fair point.

    1. I know, I love that they are changing that! Yes completely understand the hesitation with the edit button, maybe someday they’ll find a suitable way to deal with it 🙂

  2. I’m liking the changes they’ve made so far but I’m really hoping they don’t get rid of or really extend the character limit. Although it can be a little frustrating sometimes I like that tweets are short and to the point. When I follow 700+ people I don’t want to be scrolling through essays x

    Becky @ The Little Blog of Beauty

    1. I agree with you Becky, I think one of the things that makes Twitter great is the limited characters. I do like that they’ve now excluded photos from that, but I hope they don’t alter it more.

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