Twitter eases character limits on tweets with new rules
Twitter will allow its users to say more in the 140 character limit by doing away with certain rules. In the coming months, adding videos, GIFs and images will no longer count against the character limit. Twitter @ handles when in reply to a tweet will also not count in the limit. Users will now be able to Retweet and Quote Tweet themselves, enabling them to resurface any of their previous Tweets and add new commentary.
“One of the biggest priorities for this year is to refine our product and make it simpler. We’re focussed 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,” said Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO and cofounder.
In addition, any new Tweet beginning with an @name will be seen by all followers. This would do away with practice of ‘.@’ that users were resorting to earlier to make a tweet public.
“We’re not giving up on the idea of Twitter being in the moment. That concept of brevity, speed and live conversation – being able to think of something and put it out to the world instantly – that’s what’s most important. We’re always going to look for opportunities to make Tweets a lot more expressive, and enable people to say what they want to say. 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,” added Mr Dorsey.
Earlier this year, Twitter announced changes to its timeline, enabling people to get back to live as quickly as possible while still making sure they didn’t miss important Tweets while they were away. The reaction to the enhanced timeline has been positive with less than two percent of people opting out, and has increased engagement from people on Twitter with significantly more Tweets, Retweets, Replies and Likes.
Additionally, improvements were made this year to the process of signing up new people on Twitter, helping them find new accounts by topic, location and people. 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.
Twitter is announcing these changes now in order to give developers time to make any needed updates to the hundreds of thousands of products built using its platform, which includes Fabric, the company’s mobile developer toolset. In April, Twitter announced that Fabric, comprised of Crashlytics, Answers, Digits, MoPub and Twitter software development kits, is now running on over two billion mobile devices using Fabric-enabled apps every month. With more than 2.4 billion active mobile devices in the world running either iOS or Android OS, Fabric-enabled apps are installed on the vast majority of mobile devices.
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