Twitter Lets You Write More as Usernames No Longer Count to 140 Character Limit

Twitter is now helping you send slightly-longer messages by excluding the @username from your replies. 

The update has been in the works for a while as the company promised last fall that they were working on ways to let users express more with 140 characters. 

Now, when you reply to someone or a group, those usernames won't count toward your tweet's 140 character limit, which is great news, because some people have impossibly-long handles and when there's more of them in a single reply you barely get to say "hi." 

From now on, the names of those you are replying to will appear above the tweet's text rather than within the tweet itself, giving you more room for conversations. If you want to check who's part of a conversation, you can easy tap on "replying to" and see all the names there. Furthermore, as Twitter points out, when reading a conversation, you'll see what people are saying, not just a lot of @usernames at the start of a tweet. 

More to follow ...