Twitter Lets You Say More by Stretching its 140 Character Limit

In the next few months, Twitter will make evolutionary changes to what it considers as characters in tweets. We all know that there’s a 140 character limit for all and every single tweet that goes out. But, in a huge announcement this week, Twitter let us all know that it’s extending the iconic 140 character limit, and letting our tweets breathe a little.

While it hasn’t removed 140-character limits completely, typical character munchers such as GIFs, photos, videos, polls will no longer count in the character limits of a tweet; however, links will still count. It’s important to note that @replies (reply to usernames) will no longer count toward the 140-character limit, an initial tweet with @mentions (username) will.

No more need to do that .@ thing you had to do if you ever wanted to start a tweet with a mention. Any tweet, whether it has a mention or not will reach your entire audience no matter what. To encourage even more conversation, Twitter is also adding a retweet button that allows you to retweet your own posts so they can resurface in a tweet storm.

With no more squeezing thoughts and abbreviating words, Twitter hopes to encourage more engaging, meaningful dialogue between users, especially photos and video posts, which currently take up about a standard 22 characters in tweets.

The new changes will be rolling out in the next few months; Twitter is giving third party apps some more time to accommodate the changes. Twitter also promises that it’s “exploring more ways to make existing uses easier and enable new ones” – a feature that will allow users write longer posts that can be accessed by clicking on a tweet is rumored to be in future plans.