This week, Twitter confirmed that it is making four significant changes. Two of them sound good and two seem questionable. First, the good ones.
Photos, videos, polls and quotes will no longer count against the 140-character limit, although links still will. The downside of this change for us language people is that Twitter will probably become even more packed with images.
Another change also saves characters: a reply to a tweet will not include the original person’s name; that will appear above the reply. When user names don’t eat up characters, multi-sided discussions will be easier. Currently these are restricted to just a few words at a time because user names consume most of the 140 characters.
A more questionable change allows users to retweet and quote their own tweets. This will likely increase the amount of annoying self-promotion, which people tolerate much less than senders believe.
It also doesn’t seem like an improvement that bilateral messages are shown to all followers. Today, when a tweet starts with a username, it appears only on the sender’s and recipient’s timeline. Post-change, a two-sided message, if it is not a reply, will be visible to anyone who follows the sender. This is going to increase unnecessary load on most people’s timeline.