Twitter is officially getting ready to embrace more context for tweets: Users of the service will soon be able to tweet images, videos, polls and other types of media without having it count against the service’s 140-character limit, Twitter announced Tuesday morning.
Twitter usernames will also be exempt from the limit when they’re part of a reply tweet, which makes it easier to take part in discussions with multiple users at the same time.
The same is true for another change coming to Twitter: Soon, users will be able to start a tweet with a user name without having to worry that it isn’t seen by all their users — something that has led users to frequently start replies with a dot in front of a username. And finally, Twitter will enable users to retweet themselves.
The new rules will go in effect in the coming months; apparently, it could take developers of third-party services and clients a while to embrace the changes. “The updates have a significant impact on tweets, so we want to provide our developer partners with time to update the hundreds of thousands of products built using Twitter’s API,” the company said in a blog post.
Bloomberg was first to report about the impending changes earlier this month, at the time reporting that links would also be exempt. That doesn’t actually seem to be the case in this new update.
Twitter has been trying to figure out for some time how to let users share longer content. A few months ago, reports surfaced about a new post format that would allow the sharing of long-form content. This immediately led to a huge backlash, forcing Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to promise that the 140-character limit isn’t going away any time soon.
