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.