It’s an art to cram your thoughts into 140 characters. Social media strategists dedicate their careers to crafting the right things to say in such a small space. Now, it’s getting even smaller: Once you add a URL, that’s where the headaches really start. Twitter is going to make your life a few characters more difficult by bumping up its shortened URLs to between 22 and 23 characters, meaning you’re now stuck with just 118 or 117 characters to say what you want.
Twitter first announced in early December that these character changes would be coming in two months time by February 20. And Twitter has delivered as promised.
Twitter’s own URL shortener, t.co, typically uses between 20 characters when you don’t use https URLs, and 21 characters with the https URLs. If you do the math, that leaves you with between 120 and 119 characters respectively for your text. Boy, have we been spoiled.
Now that t.co uses up between 22 and 23 characters by default for all shortened URLs, we’re left with 118 or 117 characters. The extra characters, as few as they may be and insignificant as it may sound, really do matter to many users.
And don’t forget the third-party apps that are using Twitter’s API. They’ve also have been forced to adopt the new changes.
