Twitter is becoming a whole lot easier to use with photos, videos and @names no longer counting towards the 140-character limit in changes that will start rolling out in the coming months.
Ditching attached media, such as photos and videos, should save character-tied tweeters at least 20 characters per tweet, allowing slightly more wriggle room to broadcast your message.
Research shows that tweets which use imagery are often more attention-grabbing, a policy that AdNews adheres to.
In another addition, any tweet starting with the @name will be seen by all of your followers, removing the need to begin tweets with the strange .@ convention.
Twitter will also remove of @names in reply to tweets is in another room saver, while in another change Twitter is now allowing people to retweet or quote their own work, which should prove a hit for broadcasters who want to re-tweet old content on the go or the inner-narcissists out there.
Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey, who recently discussed the future of Twitter wth AdNews, said a priority this year is to refine the service and make it simpler.
In announcing these changes, he added: "We're focused on making Twitter a whole lot easier and faster. This is what Twitter is great at – what's happening now, live conversation and the simplicity that we started the service with.
"We're always going to look for opportunities to make tweets a lot more expressive, and enable people to say what they want to say."
Earlier this year, Twitter announced changes to its timeline, enabling people to get back to live as quickly as possible while still making sure they didn't miss important tweets while they were away.
Another enhancement was making it easier to search accounts topic, location and people, leading to a 48% increase in follows and 56% in mutual follows.
Twitter said it is announcing these latest changes today to allow developers time to tweak changes to any products or add-ons using the platform.
Changes in a nutshell
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 yourself: The retweet button will now apply to your own tweets, so you can easily retweet or quote tweet previously published content.
No more .@: 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.
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