Twitter Finally Ditches Handles from Its 140 Character Limit

When one thinks of Twitter the character limit comes into the mind first because users have to express their thought within the set limits. Over the years the use of images, gifs, quotes and links has started to lower the limit of characters left to express one’s thoughts. Twitter is finally taking a stand to bring more opportunity for the users to make the best use of the character limit.

Twitter has launched a limited testing on the iOS platform to see how the new change in the character limit will perform with the audience. But from today onwards Twitter will allow users to mentions other people handle in their replies but it won’t be counted. Users will get a greyed-out line appearing right at the top of the tweet indicating “Replying to [username]’.

The current change made in the character limit is a part of plan announced by Twitter in May 2016 wherein it will slowly allow users to get more of their tweet in varied interesting ways. Twitter is struggling against other major social media platform and it is earnestly looking forward to attract more users to its network.

The Introduction of the Chronological timeline

In the February of this year Twitter brought the entirely chronological timelines for Twitter in a bid help users in catching up with the latest tweets from their favourite users. But as of today only two per cent of the total users have made the shift to this new feature. Twitter is aggressively making changes to the age-old features of its platform to bring something new and exciting for its users. Given the fact that Twitter is going through a stagnant growth period and falling stock prices the sudden changes in the character limit can be seen as a welcome addition.

List of Changes Brought in the Tweeting activity

When a person is using attachment in the tweets which may include either images, photos, videos, GIFs, polls or even quote tweets then it won’t be counted towards the 140 character limit. Secondly a new retweet button will be enabled on the user’s profile to ensure they can tweet their own tweets or people tweet as well share or unlove any older tweet with ease and simplicity. Replying has always been a tedious task in the Twitter but form now on users will get some respite the Twitter handles will not be counted as the character limit.

A number of times we have different Twitter handles mentioned right in the replies and it counts. But rpm now on that wouldn’t be the case rather Twitter handles will appear in greyed-out right at the top of the tweets which label stating ‘Replying to [username]’.

Twitter gives a solemn goodbye to the ‘@’ tweeting culture which has emerged in the recent past. Users were most likely to tag a username right at the beginning of their tweet to get the attention of the concerned person using ‘@’. But from now onwards replies to such tweet will only be seen by the sender or by the followers and simply by the person who is specifically replying to that tweet.