If you’re a grammar stickler, it must kill you to witness all the Tweets out there that begin, oddly, with a full stop.

 

Long gone are the days when social media was a strange and glorious novelty, but Twitter is certainly about to try and bring them back.

 

The art of the 140-character Tweet is something complex and enviable. If you’re a person who always has something poignant to share with us, or are brimming with comic one-liners,  this blog post will make you happy. Twitter is the social network that never shuts up, and it’s finally making it easier for anyone who spends hours trying to chip away at letters until there are 140 or less. While 140 characters will remain the ultimate Tweet length limit, all those weird Twitter idiosyncrasies that we’ve endured for so long – they’re being removed.

 

 

 

Users have been demanding the changes for some time, but our longed-for updates have only been facilitated thanks to the return of Jack Dorsey. Dorsey returned to Twitter in 2015, and has been making waves that will hopefully halt the flatlining of the network’s user growth. Aside from cultivating a nice new beard for himself, Dorsey has been keeping Twitter on the map. Remember the recent addition of the ‘moments’ tab? Or when the ‘favourite’ button metamorphosed into ‘like’? That was Jack.

 

“One of the biggest priorities for this year is to refine our product and make it simpler. We’re focused on making Twitter a whole lot easier and faster. This is what Twitter is great at – what’s happening now, live conversation and the simplicity that we started the service with.” – Jack Dorsey

 

 

Here’s what you can expect to see:

 

THAT FULL STOP

Annoying when it’s used, annoying when it isn’t – the .@ feature allows people to engage in full-blown public arguments. By failing to put a full stop before opening with a @username, your Tweet would traditionally only be seen by people who follow both you and the person mentioned. By adding a full stop before the @, the Tweet appears on your timeline like all the rest. Magic!

Twitter are getting rid of this for-those-in-the-know attribute, meaning that everyone will be able to see everything, no matter where you tag your fellow @user.

 

REPLYING

For those times when all you’ve wanted to do is share your expert opinion at the bottom of a long chain of replies. Twitter is making it so that @username tags won’t count towards the big 140. This essentially means that you could chat to a LOT of people without, as Twitter put it, ‘penny-pinching’ your words.

 

MULTIMEDIA 

A favourite for WhiteNoise – Twitter will no longer count multimedia attachments towards the 140 characters, so this includes the likes of videos, quoted Tweets, images and everybody’s best thing: the GIF.

 

GET NARCISSISTIC 

Still got something to say? How about if you could quote YOUR OWN TWEET? You’ll soon be able to both retweet and quote content from your own timeline.