Report: Twitter will soon exclude photos and links from 140-character limit

Update, May 19, 4:33AM PT/7:33AM ET: It appears that Twitter is beginning to exclude URLs from its 140-character limit on tweets, as Fast Company notes with this tweet. The text alone accounts for 138 characters, while the URL takes up another 23 characters.

I've been to tons of Google search-releated events over the last decade, and today's I/O keynote helped me understand them in a new light.

— Harry McCracken ?? (@harrymccracken) May 19, 2016

We’ve contacted Twitter to learn whether this is now being rolled out globally or merely being tested, and will update this post if there’s a response. Our original report is below.

It’s an age-old debate: some argue the short 140-character cap is integral to Twitter as platform for quick news and status blurbs, but it can also force you to be annoyingly sparse if you want to share photos, videos, or any kind of link.

It appears Twitter may have found the obvious compromise: a report by Bloomberg suggests that Twitter will stop counting photos and links towards your character limits within “the next two weeks.”

As links currently take up 23 characters, that’s a whole lot more room for your thoughts – 16 percent more, if you’re counting. We certainly were; fitting a headline into a single tweet can be a pain.

While some will still complain about being limited at all, giving users a bit more breathing room when sharing links seems like something that should have been done years ago, or at least around the time when it  removed the limit from direct messages.

We’ve contacted Twitter for more information, but here’s to hoping the report has legs. With video and photos becoming a more prominent part of the Web than ever, it’s about time.

Update 4:05 PM ET: As is common practice, Twitter declined to comment on the rumor. Guess we’ll have to wait and see!