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Report: Links, Photos Won’t Count Toward Twitter’s 140-Character Limit


FILE - A portrait of the Twitter logo in Ventura, California.
FILE - A portrait of the Twitter logo in Ventura, California.

While talk of Twitter abandoning its 140-character limit seems to be subsiding, the company is tweaking how it works, and that should free up a few characters for your tweets.

Bloomberg reports that characters in a URL or in a photo won’t count toward the 140-character limit. Typically, a shortened URL takes up 23 characters.

Twitter has not commented on the report.

The company, which recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary, has been trying to grow its user base and to find revenue streams. The company has never turned a profit despite a user base of over 300 million users.

The company reportedly lost over 2 million users in the last part of 2015.

Jack Dorsey, who founded Twitter and then left, came back to the company last year to try to revive its fortunes, saying he was “not going to be shy about building more utility and power into Twitter for people. As long as it’s consistent with what people want to do, we’re going to explore it.”

Like Facebook, Twitter has been encouraging the use of media such as photos and videos, and recently added a polling feature. The company also tweaked the timeline allowing users to see so-called “best” tweets first or to continue to see them in chronological order.

The company also announced that it reached a $10 million deal with the National Football League to stream 10 Thursday night games during the upcoming season.

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