The social media website, Twitter, was originally mean to be a public text messaging platform that allowed users to express their thoughts in 140 characters or less. However, as social media grew, 140 characters has now turned out to be completely inadequate for most users. This is considering that users now post tweets with various content such as @ replies, GIFS, links, videos and other media.

Last year, Twitter announced that it was going to be improving their platform to give users more space to enter in their content and thoughts within their app. The company made this possible by not counting certain things within a post towards the 140 character limit. Twitter began with stopping GIFs, videos, images, and quoted tweets from being counted towards the 140 character limit, however, links within the text are still counted.

Now, the company has announced through their official blog, that usernames within @ replies will no longer be counted towards the character limit. This is a significant improvement that should give users additional space to post their responses. As per GSM Arena, the inclusion of the usernames is actually a big problem for conversations with replies aimed at multiple people.

In the past, the restrictions had caused some issues within the platform as conversations and thoughts quickly led to "tweetstorms," where posts were cut into several tweets during large conversations with multiple participants. Twitter claims that the new change has resulted in an increased engagement from users within the conversation during their different tests.

Aside from the username counting change, Twitter has also slightly tweaked their app's interface, which now shows the usernames above the tweet text, instead of within the tweet itself. According to Tech Crunch, the changes are now live on Twitter's website as well as on the mobile versions for both iOS and Android. Mobile users are advised to update to the latest version of Twitter to check out the new changes.