Your Tweets Are About To Get A Makeover

There's a big change coming to the world of micro-sharing. Twitter is about to bestow a few extra characters upon us with which to subtweet, humblebrag, and otherwise overshare our snappiest thoughts. But how many characters will tweets have with the new Twitter update? Will we be scrolling through paragraphs and monologues like we do on the Facebook newsfeed? The answer, thankfully, is no. As The Verge reports, Twitter has announced that it will no longer count links and media toward your 140 character limit. Previously, extras would cost you 24 characters of verbal commentary.

So it seems as though tweets will still have to weigh in at or under 140 characters, but that 140 count will not include links, pictures, videos, GIFs, or usernames at the beginning of a reply. Twitter has been teasing the extra room for conversation for a few months now, but had not provided any timeline for rolling out the changes until now. The Twitter update will be released Sept. 19, coming closely on the heels of Apple's iOS 10 official rollout.

What will you do with the extra characters? Will you abandon some of your most used abbrevs, or start incorporating more GIFs or reaction selfies? Will this update improve the quality of the social discourse in the Twitterverse as we approach the dog days of the United States election cycle? With the 24 added characters, you could use approximately four additional English words (the average English word is 5.1 characters long, plus spaces). Longer hashtags like #MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain and #NationalBeerLoversDay both come in under 24 characters. You could also embrace emoji poetry and give yourself an extra dozen emojis for storytelling purposes.

Only time will tell how Twitter users will indulge in the latest update's flexibility. One thing is absolutely certain — you'll have a few extra words of your friends' Instagram captions to decide if it's worth it to click the link to see the picture.

Image: Pixabay