Twitter Will Soon Stop Counting @names And Pictures In Its 140 Character Tweet Rule

Having abolished its famous 140 character rule in direct messages, Twitter is set to relax even more this rule in tweets. Before yesterday’s announcement, @names and images counted as characters but all that is about to change. In a blog post, Twitter says the following is about to change;

• Replies:When replying to a Tweet, @names will no longer count toward the 140-character count. This will make having conversations on Twitter easier and more straightforward, no more penny-pinching your words to ensure they reach the whole group.
• Media attachments:When you add attachments like photos, GIFs, videos, polls, or Quote Tweets, that media will no longer count as characters within your Tweet. More room for words!
• Retweet and Quote Tweet yourself:We’ll be enabling the Retweet button on your own Tweets, so you can easily Retweet or Quote Tweet yourself when you want to share a new reflection or feel like a really good one went unnoticed.
• Goodbye, .@:These changes will help simplify the rules around Tweets that start with a username. New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That means you’ll no longer have to use the ”.@” convention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) If you want a reply to be seen by all your followers, you will be able to Retweet it to signal that you intend for it to be viewed more broadly.

The change is not expected to be immediate and may take months to take effect.

It is estimated that users send about 347,222 tweets per minute each day on Twitter  and is still the social media of choice for corporate announcements. It lags well behind in advert revenues and user base when compared to counterparts like Instagram and Facebook.