Twitter has announced a plan to make itself simpler by, among other things, removing the need for a popular, improvised equivalent of a stage whisper.
The changes are the latest iteration of the microblogging site's attempts to make itself more appealing to new users. For instance, a few months ago, it changed its "favorite" button - a way to interact with a tweet without actually writing a reply - to the more universally understood "like" button.
The company clearly believes that it needs to change some things to attract and keep new users, but doesn't seem inclined to change anything so radically that it would upset loyalists enough for them to leave. That being said, pretty much any change to Twitter has the effect of upsetting its biggest fans a little: When "fav" became "like" last year, many hard-core users freaked out a bit, before adjusting to the fact that one of the site's buttons had changed from a star to a heart and it was fine. A rumored plan to dramatically increase Twitter's character limits, however, crossed that line, and Twitter's chief executive Jack Dorsey eventually disavowed it.
While incremental, the newest round of changes - rolling out in the coming months, Twitter says - will eliminate some of the creative workarounds Twitter's users have developed to get the most out of the 140-character limited platform. In other words, tweets will be longer, but not in the way that everyone feared. "You can already do a lot in a Tweet, but we want you to be able to do even more," Twitter's announcement reads.
A couple of tweaks to what "counts" towards Twitter's short character limit will expand the length of tweets without going too crazy. Other announced changes will tweak the reach of some tweets. That includes one of the more interesting changes, which will largely eliminate the need for the ".@," a weird, organic solution to one of Twitter's quirks. Unfortunately, the change isn't explained very clearly in Twitter's announcement, so we've done our best to break down what will - and won't - be changing below.