Twitter Confirms Media Attachments, Links Will Soon Not Count Against 140-Character Limit

Twitter also announced two other notable changes in a blog post:

Retweet and Quote Tweet yourself: We’ll be enabling the Retweet button on your own Tweets, so you can easily Retweet or Quote Tweet yourself when you want to share a new reflection or feel like a really good one went unnoticed.

Goodbye, .@: These changes will help simplify the rules around Tweets that start with a username. New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That means you’ll no longer have to use the ”.@” convention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) If you want a reply to be seen by all your followers, you will be able to Retweet it to signal that you intend for it to be viewed more broadly.

There’s no exact timeframe for the changes, as Twitter wants to give developers time to properly modify their apps and services.

Twitter has also unveiled other changes to give users more space to express their views. The “retweet with comment feature” was added more than a year ago, and last summer Twitter dropped the character limit for direct messages. Users can write private messages of up to 10,000 characters.