Twitter revamps 140 character limit

Twitter will revamp the 140 character limit by eliminating character counts for attachments and @names.

The Twitter logo.

Twitter will overhaul the 140 character limit by eliminating character counts for attachments and @names.

The San Francisco company in a statement today said the new rules would make it easier and faster for people to express themselves with more room in their 140-character tweets.

But there is no reference to increasing the overall 140 character count.

Under the revised rules:

* Media attachments, such as photos, videos and GIFs will no longer count toward the 140 character limit;

* @names in reply to tweets will be removed from the 140 character count;

* People can now retweet and “quote tweet” themselves, enabling them to resurface any of their previous tweets and add new commentary;

* There will no need to use .@, with any new tweet beginning with an @name seen by all followers. Instead after a regular tweet, should you engage in a conversation with a follower, Twitter will send subsequent tweets only to that follower.

Twitter says the simplified tweet rules will make conversations faster and more intuitive for people.

“One of the biggest priorities for this year is to refine our product and make it simpler,” said Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey.

“We’re focused on making Twitter a whole lot easier and faster. This is what Twitter is great at — what’s happening now, live conversation and the simplicity that we started the service with.

“As long as things are fast, easy, simple and expressive, we’re going to look at what we can do to make Twitter a better experience.”

Earlier this year, Twitter announced controversial changes to its timeline which saw some tweets ranked out of time order especially where they were generated when the user was offline.

Twitter today says the reaction to the enhanced timeline had been positive with less than two per cent of people opting out.

It also had changed the process of signing up people to the service. “This new on-boarding flow has resulted in dramatic increases in follows, up 48 per cent, and mutual follows, up 56 per cent, on average across both iOS and Android OS

“Mutual follows are important because it’s two people who recognise each other, talk to each other and give each other feedback. That’s critical for new engagement and usage,” Twitter says in its statement.

There is no specific date for the changes. Twitter says the updates will be available “in coming months” across twitter.com, Twitter for iOS and Android, TweetDeck, Twitter for Mac, video.twitter.com and ads.twitter.com.