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December 10, 2012

Twitter plans to slash character limits on certain tweets [UPDATED]

Twitter has announced it will extend the character length of shortened links starting in February 2013.

By Tineka Smith

Twitter
Photo credit: Shawn Campbell

The change to t.co wrapped links means that users who add links to their tweets will need to be even more cautious about character length.

Tweeters will lose two characters from their messages after Twitter extends the length of its link code.

Usually a Twitter link has around 20 characters, leaving users with only 120 to actually use in the tweet. Now, only 117-118 characters will be available after posting links.

"We’d like to share some upcoming changes to our t.co link wrapper with the ecosystem," wrote Jason Costa in a blog post. "We’re going to be extending the maximum length of t.co wrapped links from 20 to 22 characters for non-https URLs, and 21 to 23 characters for https URLs."

Twitter says they are giving everyone a "heads up" by allowing everyone to update their applications as the change will not go into effect for another two months.

The company said they will begin generating and returning t.co URL with the new maximum length on February 20th, 2013.

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Twitter says that developers should make sure their applications are prepared to handle the change before then.

When asked about the reason for the character change Twitter told CBR, "We made this change for a variety of reasons but don’t have any other comment".

Please follow this writer @Tineka_S or comment below.

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