It’s official: Twitter is making some big changes to the way we tweet.
Twitter announced today that over the coming months, it will make changes to what counts against the 140-character limit of a tweet. For example, including the username of another Twitter user won’t count against your limit. Neither will attachments like photos, GIFs, videos, polls, or quoted tweets.
Twitter says that it’s also planning to add support for retweeting and quote tweeting yourself. This could come in handy when you send out a tweet and later want to share it again with your followers.
Finally, Twitter is eliminating the need to use the “.@“ in your tweets. Twitter users currently use that feature to ensure that replies are seen by everyone, because without the period, that tweet will only be shown to people that follow both the source of the Tweet and the person that they’re replying to. Twitter says that wit the upcoming changes, new tweets that start with an @ username will be seen by all of your followers, and you can get a reply that starts with a @ username in front of all of your followers by retweeting it.
These are some major changes to the way that Twitter works. It can really be a pain to rearrange your tweet because you want to include a photo, but it takes up some of the precious 140 characters that you want to use for text, but these new Twitter changes will take care of that. And with the new @ username tweaks, you’ll be able to see when someone you’re following says something to another person, but your timeline won’t be flooded with their conversation unless the person you’re following retweets the whole thing.
Twitter says that these changes will roll out over the coming months. What do you think of these tweaks?
