Twitter Announces 4 Changes To How You Tweet

​Twitter announced four changes today to its 140-character platform that will change the way you tweet while staying under that 140 limit.

The changes will roll out "over the coming months," the company said in a blog post.

​1. @names you are replying to won't show up in Tweets

They also won't count toward your 140 characters. The hope here is to make it easier to navigate "Twitter canoes" — when so many people are replying to each other that there isn't any room for the actual, you know, reply.

Twitter handles will show up (and count toward the 140) if you mention them later in the Tweet.

2. Media won't count toward 140, either

Right now, Twitter takes away 20 characters when you tweet a photo, video or animated GIF. No more. Soon you'll be able to share all that media, which also includes polls and quote tweets, without cutting into your 140-character thoughts.

Links, though, will still take up 23 characters, contrary to what Bloomberg reported earlier this month.

Sometimes, you post a good tweet, and you don't feel like it got the love it deserved. Twitter is making it so you can literally retweet yourself and send that bad boy back out into the world.

4. No more hidden @s

Right now, if the first character of your tweet is the @ symbol and somebody's username, the only people who see it are those who follow you and the person you're mentioning. Twitter is about to open that up to the world, so no more trying to sneak a mention past your followers.

But the new reply system mentioned above will still only be seen by mutual followers.

• Read the full announcement from Twitter here.