Twitter introduces new character limit, dropping its most famous feature

Tweets will still be limited to 140 characters – but a lot more will fit into that limit

Twitter has finally dropped its 140 character limit – sort of.

The company has announced that it will completely change how the tweets’ limits work. Images and other media that are included in them will no longer count towards the limit – but the 140-character restriction will stay, at least for now.

All attached media – which includes polls and videos, as well as pictures – won’t count in the limit. The idea is that users will be able to “say more about what’s happening”, Twitter said, by allowing people to include an image in their tweet and still say 140-character’s worth of things, for example.

And when a user replies to a tweet, the user name of the person it’s sent to will no longer be a part of the limit. Anyone else tagged in it will still count, however.

Twitter had already announced the complete removal of limits from direct messages.

The company already announced the plans, which it says “simplify” tweets, earlier this year. It is part of a huge number of changes that Twitter has made in an attempt to make the site more welcoming and understandable for users, at a time when the number of people on it is falling.

Twitter has only around 313 million active monthly users, compared with Facebook’s 1.7 billion.

The expanded tweets are currently being rolled out, so not everybody will be able to see them straight away. But they should be visible immediately, since some people including Twitter’s official account already has access to them.

The company had been rumoured to be planning tweets that could be up to 10,000 characters long, but that idea is now thought to have been scrapped. Those hypothetical long tweets would really have been another piece of media in the tweet – a much more expansive amount of space that you could type into and then attach to your message.