Twitter on its blog wrote, "you can already do a lot in a Tweet, but we want you to be able to do even more."
In the past few months Twitter added the ability to :
- poll your community,
- react quickly and cleverly with GIFs,
- share and enjoy Periscope broadcasts in Tweets.
In the coming months Twitter will make changes to simplify Tweets including what counts toward your 140 characters.
Here’s what will change:
- Replies:When replying to a Tweet, @names will no longer count toward the 140-character count.
- 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.
- 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, .@: 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.
These updates will be live over the coming months.
