Contrary to what has previously been speculated, Twitter will keep the condensed SMS-like message format. Rival Chinese micro-blogging site Sina Weibo removed the standard 140 character limit in January 2016. Twitter has instead concentrated more on including additional features such as image, video and poll attachments while retaining the character limit. New users to Twitter have often struggled to understand the vague rules governing the micro-blogging site and Twitter growth seemed to have stalled for a moment there no doubt forcing the company to strategise anew on the best way to improve the social media site. Twitter engineers have been striving create a more intuitive approach to using Twitter which now has media attachments, hashtags, polls and also Periscope, a popular live video streaming service.
Live Video Streaming is taking the Internet by storm, who’s watching?
“One of the biggest priorities for this year is to refine our product and make it simpler,” said Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO and co-founder, in a statement. “We’re focused on making Twitter a whole lot easier and faster. This is what Twitter is great at — what’s happening now, live conversation and the simplicity that we started the service with.” The delay in implementing these changes is to allow developers to update their apps before the official worldwide launch. Twitter is also toying with the idea of introducing a dark mode toggle which will change the appearance of the app with the time of day.
New Twitter Features
Usernames (e.g. @dignited) will no longer be added to the 140-character count. Media attachments (images, GIFs, video, quotes and polls) will also not be added to your character count. Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. Previously, twitter users have added the “[email protected]” hack to broadcast their tweets broadly. A simple retweet now will signal the intention of reaching a wider audience. Users will now be able to retweet and quote themselves (the option has been grayed out). This as well will not count in the 140 character limit.
