According to a report on Bloomberg.com, Twitter is about to stop counting the space used by links and photos in its 140-character limits for posing on the popular service.
Twitter automatically shortens URLs to 23 characters, but with the new policy, these items in a post will not be included in the limit at all, hopefully to make the service easier to use by many. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had previously stated that the company was looking for new ways to display text, and would be experimenting with new ideas based on the way users are currently posting.
Twitter users frequently get around the 140-character limit by using a series of posts on the same topic, or posting a screenshot of longer text. Twitter first adopted the limited text based on the way text messaging was used back when the service debuted in 2006, before smartphones became the norm.
Twitter feels the shorter, concise postings set them apart from other messaging services, although the company reportedly toyed with the idea of raising the character limit to as much as 10,000 earlier this year.
The company’s executives have been stressing the fact that Twitter is useful for updating live events and the discussions around such events, as they are happening. Removal of the character count on links and photos would likely encourage users to add more media to their postings. The hope is that people tweeting from live events will be able to use a more conventional language without having to concentrate on shortening their posts to fit the limit, and miss out on parts of the actual event.
Twitter is already making an effort to include live video to its service. The company shelled out $10 million for streaming rights to a total of 10 Thursday night NFL games already this year, and is reportedly working on deals for more events, including sports, entertainment and political events.
The article reports the changes could be seen in as early as two weeks.