Two weeks from now, Twitter will now stop counting photos and links in its 140 character limit

Twitter has announced that it will stop counting photos and links in its 140 character limit. According to BBC and Bloomberg, this change will take place in the next two weeks. In January, Jack Dorsey, founder of the microblogging site was working on ways to enable its users to write longer posts. His rather longish message said:

Even China’s biggest microblogging site Sina Weibo dropped its 140-character limit in January this year to enable users to write longer posts. These changes seem to go uncharacteristically against the TLDR tag. Twitter in fact announced the increase in the limit of its direct messages to 10,000 characters last June.

Jack added that the site was looking for different ways to display text and would soon experiment based on how people use the service. The unique 140 character limit was adopted by the company as a way to send tweets that fit in all the information within a text message. It fact, it has been believed to be one of the unique propositions of Twitter. In their current format, links and photos take up to 23 characters.

The removal of the character limit for links and photos could be a move made to encourage users to add more media to their posts. Over the past few months, Twitter executives have spent focussing and pushing the microblogging site as a destination for live events and discussions.

Bloomberg reports that earlier this year, Twitter even agreed to pay $10 million to the National Football League for rights to stream 10 Thursday night games during the 2016 season. Reports suggest that Twitter now is working more deals for streaming entertainments, sports and political events. Reports also suggest that this move could be to help attract newer users as the company has struggled to do so in the recent past and has also seen a more than 70 percent share price decline over the past year.