Twitter to Stop Including Links and Photos To Its 140-Character Limit
Microblogging giant Twitter is mulling on enabling its large user base to compose longer messages without counting photos and URL links to its current 140-character limit.
In a Bloomberg report cited from a reliable insider source, Twitter will finally be removing one of the most annoying limitations on the highly popular microblogging platform in the coming months. Currently, links and photos eat up 23 and 24 characters respectively. This undesirable restriction sometimes result misleading and puzzling visual reference with few characters left for a meaningful caption.
The 140-character limit was originally conceived as a 'beautiful constraint' that would encourage 'creativity and brevity' as per BBC News. When the service started out in 2006 before the advent of smartphones, users generally crafted their tweets as text messages before posting them online.
Over the past few years, however, the company struggled to attract a fresh stream of would-be users and has seen its shares stumble by as much as 70% last year. The social media giant gradually made some changes on its platform by raising the limit on direct tweets between one user and another to 10, 000 characters. Elsewhere in the world, China's Twitter counterpart, Sina Weibo, has earlier implemented on abandoning its 140-character and limit to enable some users to send longer posts.
Additionally, Twitter is also trying to diversify media content in people's tweets by adding features and support for videos, gifs, and even online polls according to Tech Crunch. This was also the reasoning behind the company's launching of Twitter Cards four years ago- giving users more control over how they write their tweets in a bid to sign in more users as well as brands, media outfits, and advertisers to use the site.
As the company sees a decline, other social networking sites and messaging services seem to be going the opposite direction. Snapchat and WhatsApp, for example, have been gaining ground recently.
