Twitter is making some big changes, at least in the context of 140 characters or fewer.
The social media service on Tuesday said that in coming months, photos, videos and other media would not count toward Twitter’s 140-character limit. Now, for example, when a user posts a photo, it counts for about 24 characters.
That means slightly more wordy tweets are on the way.
The change is yet another attempt by the San Francisco company to make its messaging service easier to use and to attract new users.
CHARACTER LIMIT
Twitter did not, as many had speculated in recent months, abolish its character limit. Nor are Web links exempt from the 140-character limit, which was also rumored.
However, replies to another user, which start with the “@” symbol and the user’s name, will not count against character limits. Names with the @ symbol in the middle of a tweet will still count against the limit.
In addition, people will be able to retweet and quote their own tweets.
In another change, any new tweet beginning with an @name will be seen by all followers. Previously, a tweet that started with a person’s handle did not become part of their feed. If a user wanted this to happen, they had to put a period before the @ symbol.
Confusing? Some users thought so.
Twitter has tried to keep all users happy, those for and against relaxing character limits, by sticking to the current count, while allowing more freedom to express thoughts, or rants, through images and other media.
Above all, Twitter hopes that the changes will reignite user growth.
The company, which recently celebrated its 10th birthday, is dwarfed by its rival, Facebook. Its current number of users, about 310 million, trails even the professional networking service LinkedIn.
GROWTH DRIVER?
Facebook has 1.65 billion users. Even though many people are familiar with Twitter — at least that it exists — the company has been unable to convert them to active users. Twitter remains hard to understand for many, with its own lingo of hashtags and symbols.
The changes announced on Tuesday are the latest put in place with hopes of spurring growth.
“It’s a very user friendly change and it’s about time,” Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said.
While he said the changes are not likely to bring back users who have abandoned the site, new users might be less alienated.
Abandoning the 140-character limit altogether would be going too far, he added.
“They want to be purists and stick to the original vision,” he said. “Baby steps. Let’s start with that.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema