May 26, 2016: Twitter announced this week that it is overhauling the basic structure of the Tweet to better handle the media types often associated with Tweets, which often include multimedia attachments such as GIFs, images, and videos.
Today, we’re excited to announce an upcoming set of changes rolling out over the coming months to enable people to express even more within 140 characters. These changes will allow for richer public conversations that are easier to follow on Twitter, and ensure people can attach extra elements, media, and content to Tweets without sacrificing the characters they have to share their view.
Attachments and @names will no longer subtract from Tweet character limit
While Tweets will continue to be limited to 140 characters, user names and commands to include attachments (such as GIFs, videos, polls) will no longer be subtracted from the character count, thus making it less likely that users will have to abbreviate or use acronyms in their messages. This is great news for anyone who’s found the 140-character limit creatively confining.
Death of the .@ symbol
Typing a period (“dot”) in concert with the @ symbol to broadcast Tweets to both the intended recipient and his/her followers is no longer necessary. Instead, simply Retweeting it will do the job. In an interview with online publication The Verge, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey acknowledged that this feature was never well understood by Twitter’s user base, so it’s unlikely that anyone will miss it.
Self-Retweeting and Self Quote Tweeting now enabled
“We’ll be enabling the Retweet button on your own Tweets,” announced Twitter,” “so you can easily Retweet or Quote Tweet yourself when you want to share a new reflection or feel like a really good one went unnoticed.” While the usefulness of this tweak might seem obscure, one writer suggested that this selt-referential feature will be of particular interest to “thought leaders” on Twitter.
While Twitter power users will welcome these changes, it remains to be seen whether they’re sufficient to stimulate more engagement and user growth for the service, or more interest from advertisers, whose favorite platform continues to be Facebook, whose audience is much larger and whose ad targeting technology is more sophisticated than Twitter’s.
Still, if Twitter’s new changes – scheduled to roll out over the next few months – make it easier for users to engage with each other, that’s good news for the service, and welcome news for all who are concerned with a single social network dominating the social marketing ecosystem.
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