Starting September 19, Twitter is about to see a pretty drastic change. Once limited to 140 characters, Twitter will now go much further, as the company plans to begin rolling out changes next week that result in images, GIFs, videos, polls, and other links not counting towards your 140 character limit. The date of the changes — which were initially announced back in May — comes from The Verge via two verified sources.
In addition to the media and polls that will no longer take up the room of your hot takes, usernames will also no longer count towards the character limit. It’s not clear yet if there will be a limit on the number of people you can tag before Twitter decides enough is enough and starts to add them to your character limit, but for now, we at least know the first one is a freebie.
According to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, the changes are some of the biggest the company has ever instituted.
“This is the most notable change we’ve made in recent times around conversation in particular, and around giving people the full expressiveness of the 140 characters,” CEO Jack Dorsey told the Verge in May “I’m excited to see even more dialog because of this.”
At one point, Twitter had considered increasing the 140 character limit, but the mere mention of it was met with groans from those who enjoy the brevity of the platform. They have since agreed the 140 character limit is here to stay, but this new innovation seems to be a welcome compromise.
(Via The Verge)