Twitter tipped to stop counting links, photos in character limit

By | 17 May, 2016

MICROBLOGGING site Twitter is slated to introduce a major change in the near future, allowing 23 precious extra characters in tweets.

According to Bloomberg, Twitter. Inc plans to remove character counts for links and photos, allowing more characters for text.

Quoting a source familiar with the change, the news agency reported the shift was tipped to happen as early as two weeks time, but the company has yet to make a public announcement on the matter.

It is, however, in line with the company’s plan to offer more flexibility to users, encouraging them to add more media to their postings.

Although Twitter can automatically shorten links, the text for that alone can take up 23 to characters.

In January, founder and CEO Jack Dorsey said Twitter was exploring new ways to display text. The revision involved an experiment on how people used Twitter. For extended number of text, users sometimes posted pictures of text, or made multiple postings for a single message.

The impending change is a departure from the adoption of the 140-limit which was set to work within the constraints of normal word character limits of mobile phone short messages. This has been done since 2006, prior to the advancements of smartphones.

Journalists, who are among the most active groups of Twitter users, have welcomed the upcoming shift.

Poynter.org, a resource site for journalists, compiled dozens of celebratory memes and GIFs posted by members of the press following the Bloomberg report.



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