Twitter tweaks replies to give you more characters and greater clarity

Recent changes at Twitter have focused mainly on clamping down on abuse and trolling, but there have also been adjustment tweaks that allow users to send longer messages. Now the site is introducing another change that effectively means you are able to send longer replies to people.

The latest change does not mean that you are given more than 140 characters to play with, but the 140 character limit is now put to better use. In short, all 140 characters are available for you to reply with as @usernames no longer count towards the total.

This simple tweak will have a fairly important impact on Twitter conversations that involve a number of people. No longer will you have to make a choice between either sending an incredibly short reply to several people, or cutting out a few people to squeeze in a few extra characters for what you want to say.

Twitter says that things have been simplified in three ways:

• Who you are replying to will appear above the Tweet text rather than within the Tweet text itself, so you have more characters to have conversations.
• You can tap on "Replying to..." to easily see and control who's part of your conversation.
• When reading a conversation, you'll actually see what people are saying, rather than seeing lots of @usernames at the start of a Tweet.

Twitter used a tweet to introduce the changes to replies:

We're changing replies so that you have all 140 characters to express yourself.

Learn more: https://t.co/PNWGilbmVd pic.twitter.com/cxBJohZc2Q

— Twitter (@Twitter) March 30, 2017

The update is rolling out to Twitter online, as well as to the iOS and Android apps.