Last year Twitter decided that they would change the 140 character limit. Thankfully they didn’t choose to run with the proposed 10,000 characters. They have already allowed us to add images and Gifs without it eating up most of the characters.
Then at the end of March they made a change to how we reply to someone’s tweet so that their @ name doesn’t count in the 140 characters, regardless of how many people are included in that reply.
That’s the good news. The bad news is many of us are confused by the change.
Previously when you replied to a tweet the people tagged in it showed in the body your tweet. Then this happened.
Now when you reply you have an empty space to write your message and the people you are replying to are named above your tweet.
Previously we could control whose name went in there. Often we only want to reply to some of the people named in a conversation, but this way all the names are in there.
But, we can infact select who the reply goes to by hovering over the names (see below).
When we do that it takes us to another space where we can remove the other people if we want to by unticking them.
Considering that apparently six out of ten people abandon their twitter account because it’s too complicated, I don’t think this is making it easier for those people, but twitter says it does.
The other issue is that previously when you replied to someone and the names showed in the tweet you had control over how you composed that reply. I mostly reply with Hi @..as I choose to use a more informal style, but also I could then decide if I was ‘publishing’ a public tweet, or simply sharing a reply that will only be seen by mutual followers.
For sure many of us don’t like change to our social media and we are seeing lots of that lately, but I think it’s likely that this may well change again.
Over to you – What do you think of the change? Drop me a comment below.