New Twitter rules to loosen 140-character limit, add visibility

Twitter is changing the rules around how people are allowed to tweet on the social messaging platform, and some of the changes will lead to permitting longer tweets.

The social media company has had a 140-character limit for tweets since its founding in 2006, but under new rules unveiled Tuesday, some tweets will be able to go above that limit.

That's because previously, characters used to include media such as pictures, videos and gifs were included in the 140-character limit, as were people's avatar names.

Under the new rules, all of those things now won't count toward the character limit.

Another change announced Tuesday will see new tweets directed at individual users now be visible to everyone who follows you.

As Twitter put it in a blog post: "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."

That means replies to existing conversations won't be visible in a public feed, but a new "@" tweet directed at a single person will be visible to anyone who follows that account.

The moves are the company`s latest attempt at expanding its reach to find new users. The changes are a middle ground between users who had hoped the service would abandon the character limit entirely, and others who find the brief nature of the service one of its major appeals.

Facebook, with 1.65 billion users at last count, has no character count for posts. Twitter, which recently celebrated its 10th birthday at the end of March, has about 310 million users, according to its latest quarterly results.

Twitter says the changes will be rolled out in the coming months, and the company hints more could be in store.

"We're exploring ways to make existing uses easier and enable new ones, all without compromising the unique brevity and speed that make Twitter the best place for live commentary, connections, and conversations," the blog post said.