Report: Twitter to stop counting usernames & media towards 140-character limit next week

Earlier this year, Twitter announced that it was planning to move away from the strict 140-character limit for tweets. While the overall idea would remain the same, things like media attachments and @ usernames would no longer count towards the limit. Now, The Verge reports that Twitter is set to rollout the change next week.

According to the report, Twitter will stop counting @ usernames, media attachments, and quoted tweets towards the 140-character limit. Media attachments consist of photos, videos, GIFs, and the like. So this means that users will now have 140 characters flat to get their point across when it comes to tweets containing those attachments.

Today’s report cites a “source familiar with the company’s business,” though Twitter itself would declined to comment on the rumored date.

While it has been reported before that links would no longer count towards the 140-character limit, Twitter has never confirmed that and even with next week’s changes, links will still take up 23 characters. Additionally, Twitter is said to have considered dramatically increasing the 140-character restriction. In fact, earlier this year it was reported that the company was considering raising the limit to 10,000-characters, though Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey denied those rumors and explained that the 140-character limit was in place for a reason. Twitter last year, however, did remove the 140-character limit from direct messages.

The 140-character limited was initially put in place to allow users to post via text messages when the service first launched in 2006 as text messages have a 160-character limit.

If today’s report turns out to be true, we’ll have a little more room for deep analysis of content with tweets beginning next week on September 19th. Which personally is something I think we all need.