Twitter is going to change the way it counts characters in tweets

Most avid Twitter users are aware of the 140 characters limit applied to each tweet. While it may annoy some people, Twitter believes, it keeps the conversation to the point, concise and allows users to be creative with their message. When the limit was first imposed, Twitter modeled it to fit on a single text message on your mobile — thus the 140 characters limit.

Times have changed though, with SMS becoming a thing of the past, Twitter has been getting a lot of heat on its rigidity regarding limitations on tweets. Twitter even considered raising the limit to 10,000 characters at one point this year. However, back in May, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey took a step back and announced changes to the way 140 characters will be counted. Now according to The Verge, Twitter is going to implement these changes from September 19th.

A brief of overview of these changes coming to Twitter are:

Replying

When replying to a Tweet, @names will no longer count toward the 140-character count. This will help users fit more content while replying to a tweet which addresses multiple usernames.

Media attachments

When you add attachments like photos, GIFs, videos, polls, or Quote Tweets, that media will no longer count as characters within your Tweet.

Retweet and Quote Tweet yourself

You will now be able to Retweet your own Tweets, so you can easily draw attraction to a reply or an older tweet which has suddenly become relevant again.

Goodbye, .@

These changes will help simplify the rules around Tweets that start with a username. New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That means you’ll no longer have to use the ”.@” convention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) If you want a reply to be seen by all your followers, you will be able to Retweet it to signal that you intend for it to be viewed more broadly.

Starting from September 19th, you will be able to see these changes reflected on your own Twitter profiles.