Twitter Expands 140-Character Limit On Tweets

Twitter has confirmed rumours it is going to stop counting attachments in its 140-character limit, giving users leeway to be more wordy.

Photos, videos and other media will no longer be part of the strict per-tweet maximum under changes in the coming months, nor will users' handles when replying.

The announcement is the latest bid by the San Francisco company to make its messaging service easier to use amid sluggish growth.

Twitter has only a fifth of the users of its main rival, Facebook.

Chief executive Jack Dorsey said: "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."

Earlier this year, Twitter tweaked its chronological timeline so that tweets deemed to be of particular interest to users appear near the top.

Last year, it launched a news curation feature called Moments.

Twitter reported revenue of $595m (£408m) for the first three months of 2016, which was below industry analysts' forecasts.