Twitter to let you say more in 140 characters

SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter, famous for its 140-character constraint, is about to become less concise and more expressive.

Photos, videos, GIFs, polls — the space-munching culprits that for years have foreshortened tweets, forcing users to squeeze their thoughts into even fewer words — will no longer count against the 140-character limit (although links will continue to do so). Twitter's reasoning: People will add more photos and videos to posts if they no longer soak up 24 characters.

Also coming soon is a new form of expression: the ability to "retweet" and "quote tweet" yourself to share a new comment or thought or draw attention to a pithy observation or humorous aside that got overlooked by your followers.

"We're not giving up on the idea of Twitter being in the moment. That concept of brevity, speed and live conversation – being able to think of something and put it out to the world instantly – that's what's most important," said Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. "We're always going to look for opportunities to make Tweets a lot more expressive, and enable people to say what they want to say."

Twitter to let you say more in 140 characters

The changes that will roll out in coming months are part of the San Francisco company's intensifying campaign to combat slowing user growth and user fatigue.

Twitter needs to be simpler and more intuitive for newcomers and more creative and engaging for veterans of the service, said Twitter's chief marketing officer Leslie Berland.

Twitter is a global cultural and political phenomenon with more than 300 million users, among them pop stars, Hollywood glitterati and world leaders. But it's dwarfed by other services — it's one-fifth the size of Facebook and smaller even than Facebook-owned photo-sharing service Instagram. Growth has stagnated for months, alarming investors and driving down the stock price.

"What we want to do is make the Twitter experience for those who use Twitter every single day more dynamic, faster, more interesting, more expressive. And for the people who are new to the platform, we want it to be intuitive. We want to welcome them in and for them to know exactly what to do and how it works," Berland told USA TODAY.

The big knock on Twitter: Its complicated jargon and cultural mores intimidate the uninitiated.

Even a discussion of Twitter's latest changes isn't easy to understand for someone who doesn't regularly use the service.

For example, @ names, the handles that people use on Twitter, will no longer count toward the 140-character limit in replies, Twitter says. But mention a person's handle in a tweet and it does. Also, soon you won't have to place a period in front of someone's handle when you start a tweet with that handle if you want all your followers to see it. But replies to that tweet will still only be seen by people who follow both accounts unless, of course, you retweet that reply. Confused yet?

For longtime users, the changes could not come soon enough.

A flood of joy and relief greeted the news leaked to Bloomberg earlier this month that some elements of tweets would no longer count toward the 140-character limit.

Twitter's iconic 140-character limit is an artifact of the pre-smartphone age. Twitter was conceived for cell phones, hence the short format, the approximate length of a text message. Over the past decade, Twitter has evolved to include different forms of media. The company recently considered, then rejected, the idea of raising the limit to as many as 10,000 characters. The ultra concise nature of Twitter distinguishes the service from rivals.

Twitter said it's announcing the changes before they take effect to give software developers time to make updates to products built using its platform.

Still, some users expressed frustration at how long it has taken Twitter to make basic fixes.

"The fact that Twitter doesn’t already work this way is maddening," tweeted Alex Heath, chief millennial correspondent for Tech Insider.

Among the most frequently requested features — including by power user Kim Kardashian — is the ability to edit a tweet after it has been published.

Berland would not say when or even if Twitter users would someday be allowed to edit their tweets.

"We are looking at a number of different enhancements in the future, and we'll share any changes at that point," she said.