Twitter Update: Photos, videos, and handle tags in tweets will no longer count toward 140-character limit

The objective is to make the product "simpler", says Twitter.

The online social networking service Twitter, announced in its blog post yesterday that it intends to make the product "simpler" in the coming months. It has, therefore, decided to bid adieu to its 140-character limit tweets soon.

This move, Twitter believes, will make it faster and easier for current, as well as prospective Twitter users, to interact with others on the platform.

The updates will be available across Twitter.com, Twitter for iOS and Android, TweetDeck, Twitter for Mac, video.twitter.com, and ads.twitter.com.

Moreover, media-based attachments like photos, videos, Graphics Interchange Formats (GIFs), videos and polls, as well as @names will no longer 'use up' characters, says Twitter in its blog. Additionally, people will now be able to re-tweet and quote tweet themselves, which will help them add new comments and see their previous, old tweets as well. Henceforth, any new tweet starting with an @name will be visible to all followers.

Commenting on the announcement, Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO, Twitter, says, "We're focussed 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. We're not giving up on the idea of Twitter being in the moment. The concept of brevity, speed and live conversation - being able to think of something and put it out to the world instantly - that's what's most important."

He adds further, "We're always going to look for opportunities to make tweets a lot more expressive, and enable people to say what they want to say. As long as things are fast, easy, simple and expressive, we're going to look at what we can do to make Twitter a better experience."

Recall that Twitter had announced changes to its timeline earlier this year. Twitter is announcing these changes now in order to give developers time to make any needed updates to the hundreds of thousands of products built using its platform, which includes Fabric, the company's mobile developer toolset, says the company in a press release.

Twitter, which is available in more than 40 languages, claims that it has a total of 320 million monthly active users (as on December 31, 2015).