Twitter’s upping the Character Limit

I found something interesting as I was reviewing the documentation for Twitter for developers: Twitter is upping their character limit to 140. Well, it’s more of a regression, in a way, to the old days. Wasn’t it always 140, you ask? Well, yes and no.  Soon, Twitter is separating the @reference on replies and the attachments, so they don’t take up your valuable 140-character text space.

You know, when you have that perfect tweet, and then you attach a photo and then suddenly you’re OVER LIMIT? They’re changing that.

From their developer’s dashboard:

• Replies: @names that auto-populate at the start of a reply Tweet will not count towards the character limit. But new non-reply Tweets starting with a @mention will count, as will @mentions added explicitly by the user in the body of the Tweet.
• Additionally, new Tweets that begin with a username will no longer have to use the .@ convention in order to have those Tweets reach all of their followers.
• Media attachments: A URL at the end of Tweets generated from attaching photos, a video, GIF, poll, Quote Tweet, or direct message deep link will also not count towards the character limit – but URLs typed or pasted inside the Tweet will be counted towards the character limit as they do today.

Here it is in infographic format:

When will this happen? Twitter only says, “These changes are shipping in the coming months.” There is no date of publication on the page.

This is a huge change for Twitter developers, using the Twitter API. For more detailed information, visit this page.