Photos, videos, GIFs, polls, quotes no longer count toward your 140 characters
twitter.com
twitter.com
What's Facebook? Oh yeah, that thing with the like button. What's Twitter? Right, it's that thing with the 140 characters.
They must have spent a long time deciding whether it would be worth disrupting what made them popular in the first place to add a new feature. And in Twitter's case they probably also waited until single SMS messages were no longer really necessary.
Even a small increase to for example 200 characters would make a big difference.
$ perl6
> "日本人じゃないよ、でも日本語を勉強するは楽しいね？".chars
25
> "I'm not a Japanese person, but studying Japanese is fun, you know?".chars
66
So 200 characters won’t make any difference for Twitter.
Or just someone tinkering with the controls hoping to avoid a crash.
"Rolling out now: photos, videos, GIFs, polls, and Quote Tweets no longer count toward your 140 characters."
Otherwise you could post a tweet with 141 URLs separated by 140 spaces, and only the spaces count.
It's time they bump the character limit up to at least 512 characters.
The real question is: Does Twitter want Weibo or Line to eat their lunch and dinner? Maybe it already happened and they're still asleep at the wheel.
For the reader, but for the creators of content who largely rely on ads, quantity is far more desirable.
But in hindsight, since most usage is consumption, the 140-character limit may actually be a killer feature, even though it irritates content producers. People like sound bites.
First emergency services often do use SMS - as it's the last bit of signal to remain usable as they move into marginal areas. Data's first to go, then voice, last texts.
Second SMS never was 140 chars - it's 160 char GSM, or 80 Unicode, and every feature phone, from years before Twitter started, happily handled the GSM multipart SMS standard. I forget the limit, but it's at least 10 parts (I think it's much more - 64 or 128 maybe), so 512 char SMS is already done. In 1990-something.
Twitter turned it into the opposite with the 140 character limitation.
A 139 character message plus a 50 character uncounted URL won't pass through SMS. The 140 limit is from SMS. If you're going through SMS, meet the limit. If not, then chuck the limit, or pick another one. There is no way to rationalize any half assing like counting only these kinds of tokens or substrings in the message against a 140 limit but not others.
The limit is there because that is what makes it micro blogging. It might have been invented for a different purpose, but it is a long time ago it was there for that.