Twitter To Change What Goes Into 140-Character Count | TechTree.com

Twitter To Change What Goes Into 140-Character Count

To exclude names, media attachments; Allows Re-tweet of own Tweets

 

Twitter today announced that it would remove exclude names mentioned in a tweet as well as media attachments and links from its 140-character limit, in what is seen as a desperate attempt to regain lost ground to competing social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

The announcement, made in the form of a blog note on the official website, says that in the coming weeks, the company will make changes to simplify Tweets even more in line with the expectations of the users.

“We will make changes to simplify Tweets including what counts toward your 140 characters, so for instance, @Names in replies and media attachments such as photos, GIFs, videos and polls, will no longer ‘use up’ valuable characters,” Twitter has said in the blog post (Read it here).

However, contrary to what was reported earlier by global media (read our report here), Twitter will continue to count the characters of links in the ceiling. It is being said that this step is in line with the company’s decision to make the character count more intuitive.

In other words, the characters that one sees in the composer interface would count even if they were to be found in the links. However, the counter will not take into account anything like pictures, GIFs, polls, videos and quote tweets.

Another major change proposed by the social platform relates to the manner in which replies are designed. The changes will help simplify the rules around Tweets that start with a username. New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all followers without having to use what is called the ‘@ convention’.

This simply means that when users begin to take part in a conversation threat, the originator or any of the other contributors would necessarily have to limit the words if they wanted to reply to everyone. So, users might have to drop people’s name (@username) to fit their thoughts into the 140-character limit.

The proposed update will change all of this, as the tweet would no longer include the @mentions. The change will eliminate the need of placing a period (full-stop) before a reply begins with the @ sign – a relic from the pasts where Twitter hid tweets that started with a @mention from reaching all of a user’s followers.

The company says that some of the other changes that it worked on were having positive outcomes such as tweets that were missed while away, and a topic focused onboarding mechanism.

Yet another major change is the ability to retweet one’s original Tweet. The idea is to allow users to share their own content or links many times over – maybe, as a way to garner more likes and shares or to reiterate a point they made earlier. Analysts fear that this move to be a Heaven-Sent for spammers who could over-run timelines with reposted content.


TAGS: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram

 
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