If that happens in the next couple of weeks it'll make a considerable difference, and I welcome it. Links can often eat into essential parts of the character limit, especially if you don't want to use a link shortener service.

Welcome news. Always a pain to formulate a great tweet then have to go back and edit once the link tips the scale.

Now if only they'd also rework the reply system too. I get lots of tweets from people talking to someone else who was included in the reply and it's confusing sometimes to figure out who they responded to. Limiting the number of people you can respond to in one shot(3-5 is fine) and then also removing replies from the character limit would help. Adding another box for the reply targets would work too, that way you don't 'reply all' with a message for just one.

For a wall st listed company they need to move more quickly to reduce any frustrations like these.

Twitter has now confirmed a number of changes coming in the coming months to help free up some of the valuable 140 characters.

@ names will no longer count. Media attachments, such as GIFs, videos, polls, or quote tweets will no longer count.

Retweet and Quote Tweet yourself: We’ll be enabling the Retweet button on your own Tweets, so you can easily Retweet or Quote Tweet yourself when you want to share a new reflection or feel like a really good one went unnoticed.

Goodbye, .@: These changes will help simplify the rules around Tweets that start with a username. New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That means you’ll no longer have to use the ”.@” convention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) If you want a reply to be seen by all your followers, you will be able to Retweet it to signal that you intend for it to be viewed more broadly. express even more in 140 characters [blog.twitter.com]