Twitter's new rules to relax its 140-character limit -- by not counting usernames, links, photos, and videos -- will go live from 19 September, The Verge reported, citing sources.
Twitter had announced plans to relax the character limit of tweets in May but hadn't indicated the exact date. According to The Verge, the roll out plans may vary.
Earlier this year, the company had announced that it is going to make some changes to the platform to make it more engaging. One of the changes was to make tweet content longer to drive the conversation.
There were rumors that Twitter will expand the limit to 10,000 characters. But company's co-founder and current CEO Jack Dorsey denied that. Although, Twitter did announce that it will stop counting media, links, and usernames in 140 characters.
This will give the users more power to drive the conversations. Also, the people wouldn't need to attach a dot before a handle to let the followers see the conversation.
Although it is notable that usernames wouldn't count just when they are at the beginning of the tweet. They will count against 140 character limit when they are in the middle of the tweet. This is mostly to avoid trolls tagging numerous handles.
In June Twitter rolled out an update where users can retweet or quote their own tweets.
"One of the biggest priorities for this year is to refine our product and make it simpler. We're focused on making Twitter a whole lot easier and faster. This is what Twitter is great at – what's happening now, live conversation and the simplicity that we started the service with," Dorsey had said earlier.
At the start of the year, media reports said Twitter is going to dramatically change how your timeline looks and it might even let go of the chronological order. Instead of that, twitter took an algorithmic approach to show people some of the important updates on the top from the time when they were away from the social network.
Twiter is focusing a lot on live streams lately. It is going to live stream Cheddar's business news on its platform. In April, Twitter struck a deal with NFL to live stream their games. In July, It hosted its first eSports event live on the platform.