Twitter has officially confirmed rumors surrounding the removal of media and @replies from the 140 character count.

Media attachments, such as photos and videos, will no longer count toward the character limit. @names in reply to Tweets will be removed from the count and people will now be able to Retweet and Quote Tweet themselves, enabling them to resurface any of their previous Tweets and add new commentary. In addition, any new Tweet beginning with a @name will be seen by all followers.

We’re not giving up on the idea of Twitter being in the moment. That concept of brevity, speed and live conversation – being able to think of something and put it out [...]

Twitter inc. is making several changes that will affect its users in a good way. While the 140 character limit has stayed a major reason for its popularity, it was originally set for use with text messaging or SMS service.

Twitter had earlier considered raising the tweet limit to 10000 characters, but the company realizes that the length of the tweets has majorly been the reason for the popularity of the now “trend” network.

Now, however the company is planning to exclude the media and links attached from the counted characters in the tweets. this will free up more space for actual wordage.

Twitter is also, much like facebook, betting big on video and [...]