Twitter Will Soon Stop Counting Links & Images Toward a Tweet's 140-Character Limit
Finally.
Twitter’s 140-character limit for tweets has been the social media platform’s most distinguishing characteristic from the get-go, so it seemed especially odd when rumors surfaced back in January that Jack Dorsey and company were considering boosting that limit to 10,000 characters — effectively removing the character limit entirely and killing off tweetstorms in the process. Thankfully, that move never came to fruition, but Twitter is planning on making individual tweets — and the platform as a whole — a bit more flexible in a move that’s long overdue: it will no longer count images and links toward that 140-character limit. According to Bloomberg, the change is expected to happen in the next couple of weeks and will free things up substantially for users; for example, links currently take up 23 characters, even after Twitter automatically shortens them.
Ultimately the move is a welcome one and will, in effect, keep the Twitter we know and love largely intact while allowing users to be a bit more long-winded and include additional media in their tweets.
