About a year ago, Twitter declared that it would start getting distant itself from the need that all the tweets could comprise of the 140 characters by no more counting few things like media attachments or @ replies of the character count. But, it didn’t start evaluating the modification with @ replies unless the last year. Presently, Twitter thinks that this modification of replies is being used all across the webs, Android and iOS.
Being a refresher, Twitter was planned as a platform for a public text messaging app. Text messages are constrained to 160 characters. Thus Twitter went to the limit of 140 characters, focusing on facilitating the users to think a step forward from making tweets.
But, the @ usernames of Twitter replies did count towards the limit of 140 characters, like other media attachments, such as GIFs, videos, photos, and poll, which left valuable space for users to bring up the actual thoughts.
This also paved a way to do the informal conventions such as tweetstorms for sharing the long thoughts and Twitter canoes – big, multi-user chats which ultimately break down as a lot of people join, and character limit are filled leaving no space for actual responses to be made.
Twitter has been trying hard to overcoming these issues with the limit of 140 characters for past few months by modifying its user interface and removing different technical limitations. It removed the count limit from the tweets containing images, videos, GIFs, and quotes.
With the present changes made in replies, Twitter’s model on web and mobile will exhibit those tweets you make a reply to above the tweet text, instead of placing them within the tweets, which gives you space for expressing your thoughts in characters. You can click on the option of “Replying To” to check the users in chat and can edit the reply list. This can be done by unselecting the options appearing on the small window which appears on screen as you click on this option.
These changes are aimed to make the long chats look easier, as this option is very small in look and is not placed in tweets. In this way, you can concentrate on reading the actual tweets, without noticing the usernames. It is important as replies are the type of second level tweets which were not viewed much before.
