Twitter Logo (Photo : Blogspot)
Twitter announced on May 24, Tuesday that the social network will start moving away from its rule that tweets must be limited to 140 characters. The microblogging service is taking steps to attract new users. It will stop counting media attachments including photos and videos, and @names in replies towards the 140-character limit, but links will still be counted.
The social giant's goal is to make its character counter more natural. Characters will not show up in the composer interface for items such as GIFs, Quote Tweets, and polls, according to Tech Crunch.
In addition, Twitter hopes the policy change for @replies will make it easier for users to participate in group conversations. Replying to everyone once required using limited words.
After a while people jumping into a conversation would have to drop @username from tweets to provide a detailed response. Now @mentions look different in the user interface.
In the past Twitter's rules have been very confusing for new users. That was due to the character restrictions and the rules about who can view people's tweets.
It resulted in new tweeters finding workarounds to give their Twitter posts the biggest audience. That included putting a period in front of a response.
This "hack" became popular. However, the cipher was difficult for new Twitter users to understand so they would not feel like insiders.
Jack Dorsey is Twitter's CEO and co-founder. He said in a statement that one of the company's biggest goals this year is to make its product easier and faster.
In related news, some analysts believe that Twitter's tweaks to its business are not making major changes to boost future growth. That includes research firm Moffett Nathanson.
The company has rated Twitter's stock as a "sell" and set the price target at $12, according to Fortune. That is due to Twitter's decreasing number of users and the problems of its advertising business.
A few years ago Twitter's ad business was increasing at double-digit rtes. However, analyst Michael Nathanson reported that it is now growing at the same rate as Google whose ad revenue is 35 times larger, and Twitter is not a must-have ad buy.
Here's an interview with Jack Dorsey on censorship:
