If 140 characters never seems to be enough to voice your witty, expertly-crafted tweets, prepare yourself for the best news you'll hear all day. Twitter just confirmed that it's changing what counts toward your character limit. (Finally.)
Soon, @names in replies as well as links to media attachments (including photos, GIFs, polls, and videos) won't eat up valuable space in your 140-character tweet limit. This is great news if you're always tweeting back and forth with someone that has a ridiculously long Twitter username.
You'll also now be able to retweet and quote tweet yourself. If you come up with an exquisite @ reply you want to share with all of your followers, for example, you can retweet it, and everyone will be able to see it. Directly related to that news is that you no longer need to use the ".@" convention if you want a new tweet that starts with someone's handle to be seen by all your followers.
For example, if you tweeted "@Refinery29 has some awesome tech posts today!" (aww, you're so sweet), that would be seen by all of your followers. But if you replied directly to a Refinery29 tweet, that would only be seen by all your followers if you quote it or retweet it yourself.
Twitter confirmed these changes today, but the update will slowly roll out over the next few months. It also sounds like this isn't the end to Twitter's character limit tinkering. Twitter senior product manager Todd Sherman writes that the company is "exploring ways to make existing uses easier and enable new ones, all without compromising the unique brevity and speed that make Twitter the best place for live commentary, connections, and conversations."
For now, we're totally happy with this little change to Twitter's 140 character count limit.
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