According to reports coming out of the US, Twitter may be making a move to become more visual, with a plan to remove URLs and image links from its 140 character limit; this would mean that tweets could soon include a full 140 character tweet, in addition to an image (or images) or link to a website.
At present, users sacrifice around 24 characters per link attached to a tweet, and the same for including a photo (or multiple photos, which share the one link behind the scenes). Most users seem to have little difficulty truncating their tweets to fit within these confines, though if users include a link AND a picture, all of a sudden there’s less than 100 characters for commentary, and this can be a little tight.
Granted, this is better than the situation used to be, but it isn’t ideal. According to reports from Bloomberg, Twitter contemplated raising the 140 character limit to something as high as 10,000 characters per tweet, but this was considered to be generally a bad idea; Twitter’s appeal is in its short, concise messages, and allowing users to write small books for each tweet would quickly make the service far less useful.
This is all just rumour and speculation at the moment, but it does seem to be grounded in a good bit of common sense. Hopefully we’ll see Twitter implement this change in the near future.
Oh, excellent news. That would mean we can ditch the URL shorteners which are a security nightmare.