Twitter confirms huge changes to keep you under 140-characters

Twitter can be hard to us if you’re new to the service. There are tons of rules and restrictions that govern the 140-character limit along with plenty of unofficial tricks and tips for getting around it. Now the company says it’s ready to roll out some big changes to make Twitter more welcoming without ruining what makes it unique.

The biggest changes are focused on helping you stay within that pesky 140-character limit. Once the update hits, tagging friends in a tweet with the @ symbol won’t add to the character count, making it easier to reply to a person or even a whole group at once. Media attachments (photos, GIFs, polls and Quote Tweets) won’t count towards the character limit either.

Twitter is also making it easy to retweet your own posts. In the past, that required copying and pasting a link to the old tweet, but soon you’ll be able to re-share old message and add some new commentary with a simple click.

Finally, Twitter is getting rid of one of its most complicated rules. Starting a tweet with the @ symbol will no longer limit who can see the message, meaning you don’t have to add a period at the beginning of the post to make sure it gets broadcast to all your followers.

Twitter says these updates will roll out in the next few months. The changes all sound pretty great, so we hope the company doesn’t make us wait too long now that we know what’s coming down the pipeline.