Yesterday, Twitter’s Senior Product Manager, Todd Sherman, confirmed in a blog post that the social network will be making changes to its platform to make it easier for users to communicate with each other (we previously blogged about the proposed changes here)
Soon, @names and media attachments (photos, GIFs, videos, polls and quote tweets) will no longer count towards the 140-character limit. Users will also be able to ditch the “.@” syntax when making responses public, which has caused some confusion in the past.
However, a change not highlighted in Twitter’s blog post is that users will now be able to include up to 50 usernames when responding on the platform. People were rather perturbed, to put it mildly:
Source: Chris Remo (Twitter)
Twitter’s growing pains have been in the spotlight since it announced its IPO in 2013 – although it announced last month that it had an average of 310 million monthly unique users, analysts argue that there is a growing sense of fatigue among both users and advertisers, as Twitter’s advertising business is no longer growing at double-digit rates.
Over the years, Twitter has introduced small tweaks to its platform – including changing the ‘favourite’ button to a heart-shaped ‘like’ button and adding a direct messages button on its app’s home screen – and these latest modifications signal a continued attempt to attract more users to the platform.
Given that there tends to be an uproar when a social media channel announces changes to its platform, the reception to these latest tweaks have been far from hostile. If anything, this will make Twitter more “palatable to a general audience”, and we can’t help but agree with journalist Tim Lee that these modifications have been long overdue.