What Are The Four New Twitter Updates And Why Does It Matter?

By @TheMarkDalton

Twitter is always a network we like to hear updates from, mainly because we all know by now that the platform needs to change and evolve but we have gone through that countless times already. Up to now we have found shortcuts around the more annoying things such as putting periods before @ symbols so we are seen by more people. 

In a recent blog post, Twitter Senior Product Manager Todd Sherman announced a number of new features and updates which are more significant than they initially appear to be and more significant than what people are giving them credit for.

Here are four key updates happening over the coming months.

Replies

First, Twitter is going to disable @ names from counting towards your 140 character limit. That means you can enter a name and still have 140 characters left (about time!). That means we may not have to make as many deliberate grammatical errors to fit everything into one tweet.

I know how much that hurts the grammar police out there when we have to remove a comma or an apostrophe. Its not English class but now we can keep them somewhat happy none the less.

Media Attachments

We all have experienced this one, you have a tweet worded perfectly. You are within the 140 character limit and you go to upload a photo or a video. All of a sudden you are bumped over the 140 limit.

Who the hell thought it would be a good idea at Twitter to penalise you for adding a media file and take up what limited number of characters you have? Good news – media will no longer count as characters within your tweet.

Retweets And Quote Tweets

Twitter is now going to allow you to retweet yourself and quote your own tweet. I’m not actually sure why but for you guys out there who love an ego boost you will now be able to share your tweets again and again and again.

This could be a nifty feature for publishers however who want to re-share and quote a tweet to a link where they can add additional thoughts throughout the day.

Using “.@”

When you use “@” at the start of a tweet it only goes to that person who you are sending it to. Nobody else sees it unless they are looking at your timeline. That is annoying when you want your reply to be public to everyone who is following you. The workaround for now has been to but a period in front of the @ symbol which means everyone can see it. Well you can kiss that goodbye too.

The new update will allow Twitter users to just @ another user without the need to put a period in at the start and it will be seen by all your followers be default.

A Refreshing Update

This is a refreshing series of updates which show that the Twitter team really is listening to users. It appears we won’t be getting the character limit change any time soon, though the fact still remains that we know Twitter are discussing such changes internally so we can’t rule it out for the future.

However these are four small but significant changes which will reduce some of the frustrations we have when trying to compose a perfect tweet but the photo gets in the way of the 140 limit or we have to make it look messy with a period at the start.

Thank you Twitter!