From Sept 19th, Twitter Will Not Count Usernames, Attachments in the 140 Character Limit
That much awaited change is set to take form on September 19th when Twitter will officially be done with it’s 140 character limit. Though the social networking site hasn’t officially confirmed the new revised character limit, speculations are abuzz. The world seems to be waiting patiently to see Twitter put up it’s revised character limit to see how much of a brevity will be forgone.
However many expect the increase will be just about enough to comprise pictures, weblinks, GIFs and other media attachments etc into the tweet without amounting to the 140 character limit. Usernames will also not be counted in the 140 character limit. This was being speculated in May earlier this year, and it is finally happening!
The basic design of Twitter featured the use of the KISS strategy (Keep it Simple silly!) will now be revamped to give “people the full expressiveness” This is also coming in the times when other social networking sites facilitate their users to express without limits and in any form (video, audio, posts, polls etc) like Facebook, Myspace etc.
Also earlier this year, Jack Dorsey was allegedly inclined on increasing the word limit to a 10,000 characters which he subsequently denied. But personal replies now don’t have any limit. Increasing the character limit is much appreciated but if it leads to killing the brevity of the tweet, we might see Twitter’s authentic feature drive away all it’s users. “It could transform Twitter into more of a public blogging platform rather than one that is succinct and well-suited to quips and breaking news headlines.”, The Wall Street Journal quoted in it’s post.
The character constraint is to “Inspire creativity and brevity”, explaining the situation twitter tweeted these to notify the coming changes
- Replies: @handles at the beginning of messages won’t count toward the 140-character limit, but they will count if mentioned in the middle or end of a tweet.
- @ replies: Furthermore, users will no longer have to add a character at the beginning of a tweet so that a reply is seen by a person’s followers. Twitter will soon include all replies in followers’ timelines. The social network used to hide these responses to avoid cluttering users’ timelines.
- Media attachments: Photos, GIFs, videos, polls, and quoted tweets won’t count toward the 140 characters. Links, however, will count toward the limit, contrary to a report from Bloomberg last week.
This change to longer tweets is definitely a good one for users who spend time deleting vowels in their words to fill in more words and for those who break their head over finding a right adjective to convey their feelings. More or less, the message is to keep tweets short, sweet and spicy.
We now only have to wait and watch how the users react to the revise character limit scheduled to release on 19th September.
