Twitter enabling longer tweets
AP FILE PHOTO
Seems like expressing yourself in 140 characters or less is pretty hard these days, but Twitter is finally doing something about it.
Starting Sept. 19, the Silicon Valley staple is upgrading its signature 140-character limit to make it more user-friendly by cutting down which types of content count toward the platform’s digit ceiling.
Media attachments including images, GIFs, videos and polls, as well as quoted tweets will no longer reduce the count, as per earlier reports from The Verge.
The announcement to give users more flexibility in composing messages was first announced in May, but the company gave no firm date on when the shift would occur, until now.
“This is the most notable change we’ve made in recent times around conversation in particular, and around giving people the full expressiveness of the 140 characters,” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was quoted as saying to The Vegre in May. “I’m excited to see even more dialog because of this.”
Aside from loosening the character limit, usernames will no longer count when typing replies, giving users a more lenient room for discussion.
However, it remains unclear whether all these changes will roll out simultaneously or certain content types will gradually stop counting against the character limit in stages.
Despite the notice, the company is still keeping mum on upcoming improvements to the service, but the report confirms that the character limit comes from “two sources familiar with the company’s business.”
Twitter has considered dramatically extending tweets beyond the 140-character mark in the past, which could have allowed users to post full-blown essays on the service.
Dorsey, however, described the limit as a “beautiful constraint” and explained how it was implemented so that tweets could fit within SMS messages.
He vowed that Twitter would never lose its creativity, brevity and speed necessitated by the character limit, while adding more convenience at the same time.
The famed social networking site has also reportedly resisted the urge to increase the limit significantly, to retain Twitter’s charm with is its short and snappy messages. Khristian Ibarrola
