Twitter reportedly plans to stop including links and photos in its character counts within the next couple of weeks. This move addresses one of the most common complaints voiced by Twitter users. The strict 140-character limit the site imposes on Tweets has helped it become popular, but including a link can quickly eat away at the already small allotment.
Twitter shortens URLS automatically, but they still manage to take up 23 characters. Meanwhile, photos take up 24 characters. This has made it difficult for users to get their points across as those who want to include media sometimes find themselves with very little room left over for actual words.
This issue could be behind the social media site’s inability to keep up with other platforms such as Facebook, where users can make posts that are as long as they’d like and can include as many links and photos as necessary. Recently, Twitter has been trying to get users to include more media in tweets by adding support for gifs, polls, and videos.
Twitter has noted stagnating user growth, while platforms such as WhatsApp and Snapchat are rising rapidly. It is hoped that giving people more control over the content of their tweets will attract more users to the site. The move could also help boost user engagement, particularly during live events, as people will not have to stretch their imagination quite so much to come up with clever ways to keep tweets short enough to include links. Some people currently send several tweets in a row to convey longer messages, while others have resorted to typing out longer screeds and posting screenshots of them on Twitter.
Back in January, reports were circulating that Twitter was mulling raising the limit to as many as 10,000 characters. At the time, CEO Jack Dorsey said: “We’ve spent a lot of time observing what people are doing on Twitter, and we see them taking screenshots of text and tweeting it. Instead, what if that text… was actually text? Text that could be searched. Text that could be highlighted. That’s more utility and power.”
The limit was initially set back in the days when Twitter was largely used on SMS. While the limit can be restrictive, it also makes Twitter a reliable platform for quick updates and news.
Twitter has not made any official comments on the matter.
