A week ago, the Internet was buzzing with rumours about Twitter stopping to count photos, links and other resources in its 140-character limit. Today, the company made it official that photos, links and usernames will no longer be counted against its 140-character limit — ultimately giving peeps like us, the power to give you more news !
That wasn’t the only announcement from the company, though. The social networking giant has also made other significant changes in the way its client works. Apparently, you’ll now also be able to retweet or quote tweet yourself. The infamous ‘.@’ convention is also going away. All the new changes have started rolling out today and will reach users within a few months worldwide on Twitter’s website, as well as its iOS and Android apps, Twitter for Mac and TweetDeck.
The exclusion of counting photos, links and usernames in a person’s tweet is an amazing improvement to the social platform. Until now, since its advent, Twitter always had the 140-character tweet limit that made conversations choppy and ultimately annoyed most users to no end. Now, even though the character restriction is still in place, not counting the aforementioned resources will account for a better user-experience.
Next, the ‘.@’ convention was used by many users to make their tweets more visible. The company is now dumping this practice down the bin saying that if any new tweets begin with a username, they will reach all followers alike. If the user wants to show interest in any reply, he/she can retweet it.
The microblogging website has seen many changes over the past year since Jack Dorsey took the reigns and was appointed as CEO. With the popularity of the platform saturating, Dorsey plans to enhance the experience of existing users and bring in more potential users by changing the way Twitter works, simplifying it and making it easier to use.
“One of the biggest priorities for this year is to refine our product and make it simpler,”
Dorsey said in a statement.
“We’re focused 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.”
Just last week, we saw the company announce Twitter Kit+MoPub, a new way to monetize even through non-Twitter users, along with many other changes in the way Twitter works and presents itself. The biggest change we saw in the service (ever!) was the new Algorithmic Timeline which, initially picked up a lot of hate, but when it was confirmed to be a strictly opt-in feature, no one bothered much.
Dorsey envisions Twitter to be a platform that affects masses using live events and real-time conversations. This not only helps the millions of users the platform has around the world, but also gives developers a chance to play with the tools the company has released over the past year.
We’re not giving up on the idea of Twitter being in the moment,
the CEO said.
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.
