Twitter has announced some fairly big changes to its tweet limits and media uploads today. Early on Tuesday, Senior Product Manager Todd Sherman released news on the tweaks coming to the social media platform’s 140-character limit.
So, you can already do a lot in a Tweet, but we want you to be able to do even more. In the coming months we’ll make changes to simplify Tweets including what counts toward your 140 characters…
The changes Sherman is referring to, mainly focus on how “@ mentions” and media are shared online, as they will no longer count towards your character limit when posting. The adjustments are listed as followed:
- @(account name) and media attachments (photos, gifs, polls…) will no longer count towards your 140-limit
- you can now retweet yourself. Twitter will enable the Retweet button for your own tweets, “when you want to share a new reflection or feel like a really good one went unnoticed.”
- the .@ will no longer be needed to start a tweet when you want to broadcast the message to all your followers. This also slightly alters the way replies are seen by all followers, now they will need to be retweeted (RT’d) in order for your followers to see them
Sherman’s post ends with a notice that the changes won’t be implemented just yet for Twitters and its users:
The updates have a significant impact on Tweets, so we want to provide our developer partners with time to make any needed updates to the hundreds of thousands of products built using Twitter’s API.
The changes have been (so far) met with some mixed reactions online. Some concerned with what this means for “spam bots” and spam accounts; they’ll now be able to attach as many @ mentions as they’d like won’t they? What about replaying or messaging a user you want to reach out to, that doesn’t follow you back? Now everyone will see that conversation, Direct Message is the only private option now if the other user follows you back.
These are just a few questions and privacy concerns that have surfaced in the hours following the Twitter announcement.
What are your thoughts? “Like” or dislike the changes?
