Bloomberg: Twitter plans to stop counting photos and links within the 140-character limit

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Twitter’s legendary 140-character limit per tweet (which mirrors limits on SMS messages) may not be going away anytime soon even though it was recently lifted from Direct Messages, but that doesn’t mean the company isn’t plotting new ways to help users squeeze more words into tweets.

As reported by Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the matter, by not counting photos and links in tweets Twitter aims to make it easier to compose posts without losing 23 characters, or more, to these links—even after Twitter automatically shortens them.

“Twitter Inc. will soon stop counting photos and links in their 140-character limit for tweets, according to a person familiar with the matter,” writes Bloomberg. This change could happen in the next two weeks though Twitter wouldn’t officially comment on the report.

URLs you add to your tweets currently take up 23 characters while embedded photos take up 24 characters. Therefore, if you tweet out a story link and an image in a single post, that’s 47 characters lost to these links, leaving you with just 93 characters for text.

At any rate, dropping the character requirement for links and embedded photos might encourage Twitter’s fan base to express their thoughts in a more concise manner, interact more with the service and add more media to their posts.

Source: Bloomberg