Now adding one little GIF that perfectly encapsulates your mood doesn’t have to curb your Tweets! On Monday, Twitter announced that photos, videos, GIFs, polls and Quote Tweets will no longer count toward the 140-character limit. And what better way to do announce it than in a tweet!
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
Additionally, Twitter is testing a mentions feature so that any mentions will not count against the 140 character limit (YAS). That feature will start with a small group and eventually make its way to the greater Twitter community. In fact, Twitter might get rid of the @ altogether. This rollout, however, does come with limitations. Links will still be counted in the character limit. And the company’s trademark brevity won’t be going anywhere—140 characters is still the maximum, even if some attachments don’t count toward it. At one point, a 10,000 character limit was briefly entertained but quickly scrapped.
This update comes as Twitter is reportedly trying to focus on user experience. In May, it was announced Twitter was working on increasing and maximizing the 140 character limit by streamlining Tweets to make sure they’re working intuitively—that’s when they announced that these changes were coming, but today’s when they actually went into effect.
Woo, thanks Twitter. Now, if we could only talk about editing our Tweets… Oh, and trolls. Please—Can you help us get rid of trolls?