When trying to join in on a Twitter discussion, there are plenty of times when trying to get your point across, it can be a little tricky. When responding to, or including others within your tweets, you are reducing the size of your overall message space per tweet. Yesterday, on March 30th, Twitter announced that we all now have the full 140 characters to respond with. @usernames will no longer count toward your 140-character limit.
Rather than @usernames appearing up inside the tweet content, the names now appear above the tweet text itself. By removing the names from a tweet, the extra characters are able to be used for longer responses. Something else that’s be changed is now when hitting the new reply button, users can select who they want to reply to be directed to. If you have a group discussion going on, users can segment certain responses out to individual users.
We’re changing replies so that you have all 140 characters to express yourself.
Learn more: https://t.co/PNWGilbmVd pic.twitter.com/cxBJohZc2Q
— Twitter (@Twitter) March 30, 2017
According to Twitter, one of the biggest benefits of this new functionality is that conversations will become much easier. Rather than attempting to decipher the points made through a flurry of @usernaming, Twitter shows that someone replied to another tweet.
For more information, see the official Twitter blog post.