Twitter announces longer tweets

By Barry Eitel

SAN FRANCISCO (AA) – Twitter announced Monday that it was loosening rules about its famous 140-character limit, a shift that will allow millions of users to send longer tweets.

Since Twitter was founded a decade ago, the company has been very serious about its character limit. Hyperlinks, mentions of other users and media attachments all counted toward that limit. With the new rules rolling out Monday, Twitter is allowing for expanded tweets that are much longer than the classic 140 limit.

“Say more about what's happening!” the company posted in a tweet, adding that “photos, videos, GIFs, polls and quote tweets no longer count toward your 140 characters.”

While these media uploads will not count toward the limit, hyperlinks still do.

Suffering from sluggish user growth and poor performance on Wall Street, Twitter has investigated several options to attract more users to the service. The company announced it would allow for tweets longer than 140 characters earlier this year, but the specifics were not revealed until Monday.

The platform said it was even toying with the idea of a 10,000-character limit, but harsh criticism from users stymied the plan.

Another area the company is exploring is live digital video. The company in April signed a $10 million deal with the National Football League to stream games globally through the service. The first game Twitter streamed was Thursday between the New York Jets and Buffalo Bills. The company claimed Friday that 2.3 million people across the world watched the game via Twitter. An average of 243,000 people were watching at any given moment of the game.

In comparison, the NFL estimated that 48 million viewers watched the game on television.

Investors did not seem too excited with the changes. Twitter stock dropped nearly 4 percent in afternoon trading to $18.36 per share.