Twitter to lose clutch on its 140-character limit

The popular networking site Twitter will lose the pedals on its 140-character limit on tweets as soon as next week according to reports. According to The Verge, Twitter will make a change to its character limit on Sept. 19. The company will stop counting some things, like images, GIFs and videos, against the limit, but will not expand the number of characters it allows. Well not only this, the Twitter may also stop counting user names at the beginning of replies. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

For Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research, the change would be a good thing. However, she wouldn’t want to see Twitter do away with the limit all together.

“It’s certainly a small difference, but I know I appreciate it. I like the discipline of the character limit, but I don’t like having to try and fit in names and links.”- He added.

“Sometimes you want more room, but that would happen with any limit, and not having a limit would make it a totally different experience,” he said. “So you live with 140, but it’s nice that it will be 140 for what you write, not 140 less things like names. It will also encourage you to include more names, which should add to the community feel.”

Well, another analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, Patrick Moorhead said that such shift by Twitter could lead to more.

“Users want more room to tweet when they’ve added something like a picture or video. This could be the start of something they could build momentum around…. Recently, Twitter has been taking more steps backwards than forward. Twitter isn’t growing, and in social media if you’re not growing, you’re shrinking. To make progress, they need momentum to move them forward and this move could be a start.”