Twitter Reducing Some Tweets to Just 117 Characters
December 7, 2012
Via mashable.com by Emily Price
Think 140 characters isn’t enough to say what you want in a tweet? Get ready for 117.
Starting in February, tweets that contain URLs will be reduced to 118 characters, 117 for https links. While that may seem like a huge drop, the change represents a two-character drop per tweet from what you are currently able to send when a hyperlink is involved.
Announced Thursday on Twitter’s developer blog, the adjustment is due to some upcoming changes in Twitter’s t.co link wrapper. The revision extends the maximum length of t.co wrapped links from 20 to 22 characters for non-https URLs and from 21 to 23 characters for https URLs.
What that means: When you tweet out hyperlinks that Twitter shortens, those links will now take up a little more space, reducing the content you’ll be able to add to the message.
The announcement this week was meant as a heads up for developers, in order to give them time to update their applications before the change takes place.
Twitter users won’t see the switch go into effect until Feb. 20, 2013.
Do you think the two-character loss will make a difference in how you tweet? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
