Twitter makes it simpler, in 140 characters

Home > Business > Industry

print dictionary print

Twitter makes it simpler, in 140 characters

Twitter is about to get a little less complicated.

The company said it’s getting rid of some of its rules, which can be confusing and sometimes alienating to new users of its social-media service. For example, to direct a post to someone on Twitter and let other people see it, you have to put punctuation - .@ - before the person’s user name. If you want to reply to a tweet, or have a conversation with several people, their user names would count in your post against the 140-character limit on messages.

In the coming months, those rules will fade away, Twitter Inc. said Tuesday in a blog post.

People will also be able to retweet themselves, if they feel a post went unnoticed or if they want to add commentary to something they wrote. Media attachments, such as photos, GIFs, videos and polls, will no longer count as characters against the limit.

The company’s product, notoriously difficult for newcomers to understand, has been steadily tweaked over the past couple of years to be more intuitive. Twitter updated its login page to include examples of popular tweets, for example. Still, the San Francisco-based company has had trouble expanding and retaining its base of about 310 million monthly active users, making further changes necessary.

“This is a part of our overarching and ongoing strategy to refine our iconic product,” Chief Marketing Officer Leslie Berland said. Bloomberg
Log in to Twitter or Facebook account to connect
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
help-image Social comment?
s
lock icon

To write comments, please log in to one of the accounts.

Standards Board Policy (0/250자)