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

Why does this matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone tell me why this matters? I doubt it. Twitter isn't a good place for informed discussion. Plus, it's easy enough to post multiple tweets if something exceeds the 140 character limit. So, why would anyone care about this? Besides, social media is for people who aren't intelligent and don't care about privacy. I'll get modded down to -1 for asking this because Slashdot users don't like answering important questions. But this needs to be asked, and I challenge any of you to give me a real answer rather than insulting me. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone here is up to the challenge.

Twitter is a PR hype machine

[monkeyxpress]

The only time I hear about twitter it is when a media outlet writes a story about someone, usually someone else who works in the media, tweeting something that they think is important. From this I conclude that twitter is just a bunch of media and PR people sending messages between themselves so they can report those messages as 'news' to the general public when there is nothing else going on in the world.

Big mistake

[OpenSourced]

I have observed a tendency in all business, after having a huge success with something, to try to change it, and change again, till they kill it. I suppose it's a consequence of the human inability for just doing nothing, and letting things be.

I don't use Twitter, never have, never seen the point. But I know about Twitter The reason being that tweets are cited in all kind of media. The reason being that tweets force people to be concise, and produce text-bites for the media to consume. Forcing people to be concise is something you don't get with 10000 characters. So I suppose I'll cut myself short, too...