We all love Twitter but it has quite a number of flaws. While the fact that you can’t edit tweets is the most annoying, being limited to 140 characters was a close second. But it turns Twitter has (sort of) listened and now the limit has (sort of) increased!
Twitter has announced that most things that aren’t plain old text or emojis will no longer count toward your character limit. This means your 140 characters will strictly be your text messages and links. The addition of @names in replies, media attachments (like photos, GIFs, videos, and polls) and quotes will no longer count as part of the precious 140 character.
Say more about what’s happening! Rolling out now: photos, videos, GIFs, polls, and Quote Tweets no longer count toward your 140 characters.pic.twitter.com/I9pUC0NdZC
— Twitter (@twitter) September 19, 2016
The call for Twitter to increase the 140 characters limit has been going on for a while now- Twitter first announced this new changes in May 2016 but Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey downplayed rumours that Twitter was planning to expand the character limit to 10,000 characters. Although some users actually like the 140-character count, others have found it too burdensome and have recourse to posting photos of longer text or launching “tweetstorms” when they want to say something that doesn’t fit small chunks of text. The microblogging site has built a niche for itself in the uniqueness of their messaging and appearance. The CEO Jack Dorsey said:
“That concept of brevity, speed and live conversation — being able to think of something and put it out to the world instantly — that’s what’s most important. As long as things are fast, easy, simple and expressive, we’re going to look at what we can do to make twitter a better experience.”
The origin of the 140-character count was revealed to LA Times in 2009 by Twitter’s CEO and founder Jack Dorsey “…the particular constraint of 140 characters was kind of borrowed […] most basic phones are limited to 160 characters before they split the messages. So in order to minimize the hassle and thinking around receiving a message, we wanted to make sure that we were not splitting any messages. So we took 20 characters for the user name, and left 140 for the content. That’s where it all came from.”
Twitter has a passionate group of more than 300 million customers, including myself, and I intend to enjoy the new freedom of a few more characters- will you? Let us know in the comments below.
Want more tech news? Accelerate has got you covered.
Written by Kike Olowu
The post #TechTuesday: Twitter’s 140 Character Limit (Sort of) Increased appeared first on AccelerateTv.