Twitter is planning to make changes to its 140-character
limit, a restriction the service has had since its inception in 2006, according
to a report from Bloomberg. Sources told the financial wire service that
Twitter is expected to announce sometime in the next two weeks that photos and
links included in tweets will not count towards the 140-character limit.
Links currently take up 23 characters of the total 140
available, and it doesn’t matter how short the links are because Twitter
“wraps” every link with its own auto-shortened URL. Twitter says it does this
so that it can cut down on malicious links and also track how many times people
click on them. Photos take up 20 characters worth of the 140 limit.
The Bloomberg report is just the latest in a series of
rumors about Twitter expanding its character limit that have swirled around the
company over the past six months or so. In January, for example, the news site
Recode said Twitter was planning to expand the number of available characters
for a tweet to 10,000 in an attempt to appeal to new users.
In March, Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey said that
the 140-character limit was not going away.
“It’s staying. It’s a good constraint for us, and it allows
for of-the-moment brevity,” Dorsey said. But at the same time, Dorsey’s
comments (posted as a screenshot) seemed to leave the door open for a feature
that would allow people to post longer chunks of text but still only show 140
characters in the Twitter timeline.
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