Twitter To Stop Counting Photos And Links In 140-Character Limit (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Twitter will stop counting photos and links as part of its 140-character limit for tweets in as soon as two weeks, according to a source familiar with the matter. Right now, links take up 23 characters, even after Twitter automatically shortens them. In January, the Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey said the company was looking for new ways to display text on Twitter, and would experiment based on how people use the service. The company considered raising the limit of characters to as many as 10,000. The reason it abides by a 140-character limit is because it allows for tweets to be sent within a mobile text message, which was a common form of sending tweets back in 2006 when the site debuted. Earlier this month, it was reported Twitter blocked U.S. intelligence agencies from having access to a widely used data mining service it partly owns.

Comments

I think this is a good decision

[Theovon]

These days, people don’t know how to he informative and concise. Twitter forces people to think about what they write. However, 140 characters can also be overly restrictive sometimes, which is why people have wanted to increase the character limit. But if they increase it too much, Twitter will just turn into another blogging service. I think that simple exempting images and links is a good compromise.

Re:Is Twitter making a profit yet?

[gfxguy]

Social Media is counted in Nielsen ratings now. Over the past few years you've seen more and more TV shows (including news and talk shows) flash hashtags and accounts to tweet at. I work in television, and while I hate social media the simple fact is that we have to deal with it and try to get the number of mentions up. So we show people's tweets and instagrams and vines on the air. So people will pay attention to detail in our show, and try to post witty things that might get them a mention on the air (it's a live sports show). Shows like "The Talking Dead" get a LOT of social media attention for the shows they are promoting. So that's what it's about now. We don't pay twitter to use tweets on the air. We do, however, pay companies that aggregate social media data. They, in turn, have professional accounts and pay the social media companies for expanded search access. I don't know if it's enough, but it's something.