Twitter announced Thursday that it's no longer counting user names in tweets, such as @idownloadblog, toward its 140-character limit. With this change, any user names for mentions and replies will no longer shorten the amount of characters you could include in a tweet.
Last year, the micro-blogging service began allowing users to attach photos, animated GIFs, videos, polls, quoted tweets and direct messages to tweets without the links counting against the 140-character limit.