Bloomberg is reporting that Twitter is considering making a small but important change to how they handle links to photos and URLs in Tweets, perhaps as soon as next week. According to the report, the company is considering not counting links to photos and other web links against the 140-character limit that is place for Tweets today. It is a small change but with URLs taking up to 23 characters, that adds a lot of space for users to get more content in their posts.
The social media company will soon stop counting photos and links as part of its 140-character limit for messages, according to a person familiar with the matter. The change could happen in the next two weeks, said the person who asked not to be named because the decision isn’t yet public. Links currently take up 23 characters, even after Twitter automatically shortens them. The company declined to comment.
While Twitter themselves did not comment on this article from Bloomberg, there has been plenty of rumblings about the company making changes to their character limits. This, it seems, is a good compromise.
The defining feature of Twitter has been the 140-character limit and if the company completely removed it, Twitter would simply become yet another social network that has lost its identity. I, for
Twitter for Android
one, like the limit. This tweak would be welcome though as any time you post a photo you eat up characters you could use to describe that photo.
If this is implemented, there is no indication of if there would be a required app update to support it. It is very likely one would not be needed as this is mostly a back end change.
