Longer Tweets Coming Soon

| Social media

Longer Tweets Coming Soon

It’s been a long time coming but Twitter is about to make a rather big change to the way you tweet.

According to The Verge, as of September 19th Twitter will no longer count things like GIFs, Images, Videos, Quoted tweets and Polls as characters meaning you will have more characters to compose your tweets.

Twitter announced that they will be changing the character counting back in May  but at the time didn’t give any dates to when this new feature will be rolled out.

Another new feature is that the character limit won’t include @usersnames when they are at the beginning of a tweet, which again will give Twitter users more characters to play around with.

At this time, it is unclear whether or not these new changes will be released simultaneously or spread out over the next few months but we know they are on their way.

Despite, the Verge supposedly having a very reliable source, Twitter are yet to confirm this.

However, Twitter senior product manager Todd Sherman announced in May that “In the coming months we’ll make changes to simplify Tweets including what counts toward your 140 characters, so for instance, @names in replies and media attachments (like photos, GIFs, videos, and polls) will no longer “use up” valuable characters”. 

Talks within the company regarding extending the maximum length of tweets has been going on for a very long time and at one point there was even reports saying Twitter could be expanding their famous 140 character limit to 10,000 in attempts to compete with Facebook, however this caused major backlash among the website’s users.

Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, calmed down users by confirming that Twitter would not be ditching the 140 character limit and described it as a “beautiful constraint”.

This approach to giving Twitter users more space to express themselves stays true to 140 character limit while avoiding unnecessarily wasted characters with content that isn’t valuable.

This means that Twitter will centre the character limit on the message itself and not the attachments or usernames that currently just waste your characters.  

Luke Stanley