Twitter to stop counting mentions and attachments in 140 character limit

Responding to trends in the way tweets are composed, Twitter is changing what counts towards the 140 character limit. Twitter is making it easier to treat each tweet as a canvas instead of a message. Username mentions in replies and multimedia attachments such as gifs, videos or photos will no longer count towards the limit of 140 characters.

https://twitter.com/twitter/status/735108260718469121

The removal of a limit on mentions means that more people can be tagged in a tweet, and larger groups can be formed. There seems to be no limit mentioned about the number of people that can be tagged, but this can lead to spammy situations. Similarly, there seems to be no limit to the number of multimedia attachments in a tweet. Videos, polls or quote tweets will not use up any characters.

Other changes include the ability to retweet yourself, and quote yourself. This can be used to give an update to a previous tweet, or to push out a really important or carefully crafted tweet if it did not do well the first time around. The update changes the way developers use Twitter’s API. Twitter is giving the developers time to integrate the changes into their services and applications, before rolling out the changes to the general public.

The announcement comes close of Twitter stopping  links and photo attachments from using up characters in the 140 characters limit.