While earlier reports claimed Twitter was considering ditching the 140-character limit altogether, Bloomberg offers up some more details on Twitter’s plans for the limitation. According to the report, Twitter will soon stop counting photos and links towards the 140-character limit as a way to encourage people to add more media to their tweets.
Specific details remain somewhat unclear. Currently, links account for 23 characters each, meaning you can technically fit six links in a tweet at most. There’s also a four image limit per tweets. It’s unclear if Twitter will impose a limit on links per tweet once it stops counting them against the 140-character limit.
The report, citing an anonymous source, notes that the change could roll out sometime over the next two weeks to users. The move comes following Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey saying earlier this year that the company has been looking into new ways for users to share more text on the service. The ultimate goal with this change, however, is to give users the ability to add more media to their posts while also freeing up some characters for more text.
Earlier this year, reports started circulating that Twitter was looking to increase the 140-character limit to 10,000-characters, but Dorsey denied those rumors. At the time, Dorsey said the limit was “a good constraint for us, and it allows for of-the-moment for everything.” Twitter last year, however, did remove the 140-character limit from direct messages.
Twitter initially introduced the 140-character limit to allow users to post via text messages when the service first launched in 2006. Text messages have a 160-character limit. At that time, people were sharing fewer images and links than they are now to the service thanks to smartphones.
What do you think of the possibility of Twitter no longer counting images and links towards the 140-character limit? Personally, I think it allows for just enough additional room to more easily add commentary to links and articles especially.
