Twitter Tweaks Formula; Links and Photos No Longer Count

Good news to Twitter users who struggle with trying to cram as much as possible into every Tweet: Bloomberg is reporting that Twitter will begin excluding both website URLs and photos from each tweet's character count.

Currently, a photo or a URL takes up 23 characters per tweet thanks to the URL shortener Twitter uses on both links and pictures uploaded to pic.twitter.com.

While the company is still holding fast to the 140 character limit (excluding URLs and pictures), this step indicates that Twitter may be trying to put more oomph in the "blogging" portion of its definition as a micro-blogging service. The company has been adding more multimedia elements (the ability to stream live Periscope broadcasts in tweets, for example) and rumors have persisted that it's also mulling a thousand-character tweet limit.