The Day Has Come. More Room For Tweets

As rumored for some time, Twitter is no longer going to count photos, usernames, links, quoted Tweets, and other attachments against your 140 character count.

We'd been hearing rumors that this might happen. Today, Twitter officially announced on their blog that you will be getting a little more breathing room in your tweets. Per the announcement, "In the coming months we’ll make changes to simplify Tweets including what counts toward your 140 characters, so for instance, @names in replies and media attachments (like photos, GIFs, videos, and polls) will no longer “use up” valuable characters."

They are also changing the ".@" convention. Now when a tweet begins with a handle, you will not have to put the period in front of the @. When the change happens "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."