Twitter has announced new rules that will allow users to pack more information into their 140-character updates.
In the “coming months,” Twitter will no longer count replies, photos, GIFs, videos and polls as characters. When replying to a tweet, @names will no longer count toward the character limit. Attachments, such as photos, also won’t take up valuable characters.
The changes will take a few months because, according to Twitter, the company needs “to provide our developer partners with time to make any needed updates to the hundreds of thousands of products built using Twitter’s API,” according to a blog post by product manager Todd Sherman.
Twitter says more changes are coming and the company is “exploring ways to make existing uses easier and enable new ones.”
In January, CEO Jack Dorsey said the company was trying to find new ways to give users more flexibility on the social media platform. Twitter wanted to experiment with how people use the service, and Dorsey noted that many were already taking screenshots of longer messages and posting several tweets in a row to bypass the 140-character limit.
In August, Twitter removed the 140-character limit for direct messages. The word limit was originally adopted by the social media platform because it was a way to fit information within an SMS message in 2006, before smartphones came into existence.