Your zany uncle’s Tweets are about to get a bit more long-winded, even with those photos, GIFs, and other add-ons. After announcing last spring that it would revamp the way it counts characters in Tweets, Twitter has reportedly put a date on when this change will kick in.
Starting Sept. 19, Twitter will no longer count usernames in replies, media attachments — think photos, GIFs, videos, and other content — and quoted Tweets against the 140-character limit, The Verge reports, citing sources familiar with the company.
Twitter first announced in May that it would allow users to express more on the site by simplifying what counts toward the character restriction in the “coming months.”
“So for instance, @names in replies and media attachments — like photos, GIFs, videos, and polls — will no longer ‘use up’ valuable characters,” Todd Sherman, senior product manager for Twitter, said in a blog post in May.
The 140-character limit was first used by Twitter because that was the limit for a single mobile text message. Tweeting by text was popular back in the pre-smartphone era of 2006, when the social media company first launched.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey previously said the 140-character limit will live on because it’s “too iconic” to get rid of.
“It’s staying. It’s a good constraint for us,” he said in March. “It allows for of-the-moment brevity.”
Twitter’s new, longer tweets are coming September 19th [The Verge]
by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist
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