While the blue-bird-fronted microblogging website is famous for its crisp style of writing, if you’re more of the verbose type, you’ll probably have found Twitter’s 142 character limit a bit of a pain when you’re bashing out your prosaic ramblings or witty retorts.
You’ll no doubt have felt this restriction particularly acutely when replying to someone – since Twitter counts all usernames as part of your reply, (so typing back to a the lengthy-named likes of @Frankie200087istheabsolutebest makes life very difficult).
However, Twitter has finally announced it is to alleviate this latter struggle, be excluding any username mentions from its 140-character limit, thus giving you a precious few more letters to work with – often crucial to hitting that right Tweeting note, eh?
The change will be available across all devices and desktops, and now Tweeters will simply see the username appear above the text when composing a reply, with the recipient’s profile picture and Twitter handle highlighted outside of the text box. If your thread includes more than one person, you’ll see a username followed by “1 other,” and so on.
The site is also rolling out a new “Replying to” feature. In a nutshell, when you contribute a new tweet to an ongoing thread, you will see checkboxes next to usernames in the conversation. Excluding them from the reply is as easy as unchecking the box next to their username.
If you think your conversational type stream needs more than 142 characters, probably best to stick to Facebook or Insta. Or better yet, start a blog.
And if you need help in that department, read our useful article here.