{"id":216894,"date":"2016-05-25T06:29:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-25T06:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/citifmonline.com\/?p=216894"},"modified":"2016-05-25T06:29:00","modified_gmt":"2016-05-25T06:29:00","slug":"twitter-revamps-140-character-tweet-length-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/?p=216894","title":{"rendered":"Twitter revamps 140-character tweet length rules"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"story-body__introduction\">Twitter is overhauling some of its rules to try to make itself simpler to use and more attractive to newcomers.<\/p>\n<p>Members will be able to add multimedia to tweets &#8211; including pictures and videos &#8211; without eating into the 140-characters-a-post limit.<\/p>\n<p>The service is also changing the way it handles conversations between users.<\/p>\n<p>Twitter co-founder and chief executive Jack Dorsey told the BBC his aim was to ensure that &#8220;when people tweet, it makes sense&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>One analyst said the moves marked a &#8220;positive change&#8221;, but added that they only addressed &#8220;one symptom&#8221; of Twitter&#8217;s difficulty in increasing its audience.<\/p>\n<p>Despite constant references to tweets in the news, over the past year Twitter has struggled to attract fresh users to its platform &#8211; a problem partly blamed on it being confusing.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;One of the biggest priorities for us this year is to really refine our product, to make it simpler,&#8221; Mr Dorsey said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I think there&#8217;s a story to be told about what Twitter&#8217;s for, and to continue to strengthen why you would use Twitter.&#8221;<\/p>\n<figure class=\"media-landscape no-caption full-width\"><span class=\"image-and-copyright-container\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"responsive-image__img js-image-replace\" src=\"http:\/\/ichef-1.bbci.co.uk\/news\/624\/cpsprodpb\/1627C\/production\/_89784709_4ae7efdf-aca6-4587-a790-6ef8e90ced05.jpg\" alt=\"Twitter\" width=\"624\" height=\"397\" data-highest-encountered-width=\"624\" \/><\/span><\/figure>\n<p>Some of the details were reported by the Bloomberg news agency a fortnight ago, and were, for the most part, welcomed by users.<\/p>\n<p class=\"story-body__crosshead\"><strong>&#8216;Doesn&#8217;t make sense&#8217;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The changes, as outlined by Twitter, will be:<\/p>\n<ul class=\"story-body__unordered-list\">\n<li class=\"story-body__list-item\">media attachments, such as photos and videos, will no longer count towards the character limit<\/li>\n<li class=\"story-body__list-item\">@names in reply to tweets will not be counted<\/li>\n<li class=\"story-body__list-item\">people will be able to retweet and quote-tweet themselves, enabling them to resurface any of their previous posts and add new commentary<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In addition, any new tweet &#8211; ie one that isn&#8217;t a reply to someone else&#8217;s tweet &#8211; that starts with a username will now be seen by all of a person&#8217;s followers.<\/p>\n<p>That last change does away with one of Twitter&#8217;s more baffling systems, in which posts beginning with a username would only be seen by a person&#8217;s followers if they too were following the member mentioned at the start of the tweet.<\/p>\n<p>To override the rule, people have been adding a full stop to their tweets, so that they read &#8220;.@username&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It doesn&#8217;t make sense to anyone,&#8221; Mr Dorsey told the BBC. &#8220;And people have had to work around it. That just looks ugly, and it&#8217;s confusing.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"story-body__crosshead\"><strong>Time to adapt<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Brian Blau, an analyst at the consultancy Gartner, said Twitter&#8217;s problems in gaining new users would not be solved with these changes.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The core problem is attracting new users and getting them to be loyal users over time,&#8221; he explained.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;And we haven&#8217;t seen anything from Twitter yet that leads me to believe that they&#8217;re addressing that fundamental problem.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The changes will not be made until later this year.<\/p>\n<p>This is to allow developers to integrate the new rules into their third-party apps and websites.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<\/p>\n<p>Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Twitter is overhauling some of its rules to try to make itself simpler to use and more attractive to newcomers. Members will be able to add multimedia to tweets &#8211; including pictures and videos &#8211; without eating into the 140-characters-a-post limit. The service is also changing the way it handles conversations between users. Twitter co-founder [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":214837,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-216894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=216894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216894\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/214837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=216894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=216894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=216894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}