Twitter has been making various changes to do away with its strict 140-character limit, and now, in the latest development, the company announced changes when you reply to a tweet. Now the username will not be counted against the 140-character limit.
Changes to character limit
A year ago, the company did express intentions of relaxing the restrictions for 140-character tweets in a bid to bring more members onto the platform.
Twitter Product Manager Sasank Reddy said on Thursday, “Remember how we told you we were working on ways to let you to express more with 140 characters?”
Twitter announced the development in a blog post, saying that it also made changes to the way it display tweets. Now, when a user replies to a tweet, the name will appear above the tweet text (not within the tweet text); therefore, the user can add more characters. A user can simply tap to reply to the tweet and check who has seen the conversation. If the user wants to remove people from the ongoing conversation, they just have to uncheck the boxes.
The company stated that the updates “we’re making today are based on feedback from all of you as well as research and experimentation.” Further, the blog read that as per their experience, people engage more with a conversation on the platform.
Twitter has been struggling to get on a path of higher revenue as its user growth is declining, along with its grim advertising revenue. Compared to Facebook, the micro-blogging firm does not have impressive tools for sharing and creating content.
Long road for Twitter
Twitter rivals such as Facebook and Instagram provide high degrees of freedom to users to share videos and content instead of sticking closely to text. Although the micro-blogging firm is sitting on a user base of 300 million, growth has taken a hit in recent years.
With the character limit relaxed, users will be encouraged to share pictures, links and videos, helping boost engagement. The micro-blogging site stated that its change to the @replies feature is more about the conversation, and with each response in the conversation, new content is created.
Twitter has been trying to make the platform simple and more user-friendly, and the latest change is a good step in that direction. But the update does not solve the actual problem and may create new issues for the new users who were gradually coming in terms with the features of Twitter.
This relaxing in the character limit fuels some other worries as well. One such concern is that users will now be able to spam a large number of other users at once, a practice often termed “Twitter canoe.” Nevertheless, Reddy stated that the work has not yet finished and that the company will look into improving the conversation further and making the platform easier for users.