Twitter Latest Updates: Twitter May Remove Photos and Links from its 140-character Tweet limit

Twitter users for a long time have often complained about the fact that link and photo URLs count against each tweet's 140-character limit. Now it may finally change.

According to a report, Twitter will now exclude photos and links in character counts, possibly as early as within the next two weeks which then are automatically shortened by Twitter, but would still take in about 23 characters. The platform has often explored ways to make it easier to include links in tweets since 2010, when its t.co link shortened service was launched. Twitter declined to immediately comment on the report. If the new character count policy is indeed implemented, it will then allow people to compose wordier tweets.

CEO Jack Dorsey said that the time that Twitter is "not going to be shy about building more utility and power into Twitter for people. As long as it's consistent with what people want to do, we're going to explore it." Twitter has been encouraging users to include more media in their tweets with features like support for videos, gifs, and polls. However, twitter have now seemed to recognize that it is the space to write more for all of the users. Users have resorted to tweetstorms (which won't work as well and may become downright incomprehensible now that Twitter is moving from a chronological to algorithmic and screenshots of text. The ability to jam more text, media, links, and other content into individual tweets was the point of Twitter Cards, which launched four years ago to attract more brands, media organizations, advertisers, and other power users to the platform.

Twitter may finally be able to lure more people into the site which is important because the company's user-growth overtime has stagnated while other competitors, social networks and messengers like Snapchat and WhatsApp continue to gain traction.