Technology

Twitter unveils suite of changes giving users greater freedom

Social media platform Twitter has announced it is to change its rules to allow users to write longer Tweets.

After months of speculation, the social network has elected to alter its brand-defining 140-character message length, introducing new rules enabling @? names and media attachments to be included outside of character length restrictions. Users will therefore be able to write longer messages.

An announcement made by Twitter on its official blog said that these updates, alongside other changes, will be available to users over the coming months.

Twitter also plans to enable the retweet? button on users? own tweets, so they can retweet or quote tweet? their own messages to get more exposure. When replying to tweets, messages that begin with a username will no longer need the @? symbol in front of it.

In a statement, Twitter senior product manager Todd Sherman said that the platform’s developers were being notified of the desired changes months in advance to guarantee everything works correctly when rolled out.

Sherman added: The updates have a significant impact on tweets, so we want to provide our developer partners with time to make any needed updates to the many thousands of products built using Twitter’s API.

in addition to these changes, we have plans to help users get even more from their tweets. Were exploring ways to make existing uses easier and enable new ones, all without compromising the unique brevity and speed that make Twitter the best place for live commentary, connections, and conversations.

Despite the huge profile and loyal user base that Twitter has developed in the ten years since it was founded, the platform has struggled to remain relevant in recent years, and its user base has plateaued.

In an attempt to reverse the platform’s fortunes and fix Twitter, the company rehired original co-founder Jack Dorsey as CEO in October last year. Twitter had been under the stewardship of CEOs Evan Williams and Dick Costolo since Dorsey first stepped down in 2008.