Links And Photos Will Reportedly No Longer Count Toward Twitter’s 140 Character Limit

Within the next two weeks, Twitter is expected to announce that it will no longer count links or images toward its current 140-character limit. Right now, links take up 23 characters — though Twitter does automatically shorten all links — while adding photos (and videos) takes up 24 characters.

Twitter has reportedly been toying with changing its character limit for a while now in order to make the product easier to use, according to Bloomberg, which was first to report the rumored update. In January, for instance, the company was reportedly weighing expanding the limit on tweets to 10,000 characters — though co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey ultimately opted to stick with 140 characters. Twitter was founded to deploy 140-character messages in 2006 because that was the size of a standard text messages (before the proliferation of smartphones).

Right now, if users want to post a message that’s longer than 140 characters, they must either post a screenshot of text or deploy the statement in a series of tweets often referred to as a tweetstorm.

In other Twitter news, the company started to pilot today a ‘Go Live’ button within its Android app among a small number of users that enables them to fire up a live Periscope broadcast directly from inside of Twitter. The company told The Verge that it will be rolling out the feature to all users soon.