If Twitter’s 140-character limit sometimes has you swearing under your breath as you endeavor to express that grand idea or provocative opinion in just a couple of lines, we have some good news for you.
The microblogging service is reportedly about to make a major alteration to the way it counts those characters, giving you the chance to add an extra word or three when formulating your profound thoughts for your army, or perhaps handful, of followers.
From September 19, Twitter will remove a bunch of stuff from counting toward your character limit, including @names in replies, and media attachments such as photos, GIFs, videos, and polls.
The change was promised by the company back in May, but for a long time we heard next to nothing on the matter. However, The Verge has just reported that the new system will be rolled out at the start of next week, citing an unnamed company spokesperson as its source.
It’s not certain if all the Twitter elements listed above will cease to affect your character limit at once, or if they’ll be excluded one by one over the course of several weeks, starting on Monday. We’ll soon find out.
There’s been much talk over the years about whether Twitter will ever raise its 140-character limit, with talk earlier this year suggesting it might give users the chance to post messages of up to a whopping 10,000 characters.
But even with the incoming changes, the 140 limit stays. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said back in March that rumors of the current limit’s demise had been greatly exaggerated, insisting it’s here to stay.
The restriction on the length of posts has forced loquacious types on Twitter to think creatively when it comes to communicating their thoughts and ideas, with many taking a screenshot of a longer message and posting the image instead of spreading the text across a bunch of tweets.
The changes come as the San Francisco-based company continues to struggle to turn a profit and increase its user base, which currently stands at 313 million. There have been recent suggestions that another company could acquire Twitter, though representatives of the social media site said last week there were no bids on the table and that it was currently focusing on cutting costs.
