In May of this year, Twitter promised it would be stopping counting media and other non-text content against its 140-character limit. Today, the company announced that embedded photos, videos, GIFs, polls and quoted tweets no longer count toward your 140 characters.
Twitter originally promised to also stop counting user mentions like @iDownloadBlog, but didn’t specify today when it’ll drop @usernames from the character count.
“When replying to a tweet, @names will no longer count toward the 140-character count. This will make having conversations on Twitter easier and more straightforward, no more penny-pinching your words to ensure they reach the whole group,“ said the firm in May.
Before today, any embedded media used to take up 24 characters per tweet so it’s most definitely awesome that everyone now has more room for words when tweeting.
Say more about what's happening! Rolling out now: photos, videos, GIFs, polls, and Quote Tweets no longer count toward your 140 characters. pic.twitter.com/I9pUC0NdZC
— Twitter (@Twitter) September 19, 2016
Twitter originally promised it would be treating tweets starting with a username differently to make them accessible to all followers rather than limit visibility to just the mentioned users. This should finally put an end to the longstanding ”.@” convention that many Twitter fans have resorted to using in order to ensure their tweet reached everyone.
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Source: Twitter