Twitter’s self-imposed — and endlessly fascinating — 140-character limit on “tweets” is being tweaked to include pictures and video, the company announced on Tuesday night.
Although a number of third-party programs which access Twitter’s output via its database can already link directly to pictures and videos on other sites, the site itself has so far held back from allowing anything beyond text-only hyperlinks to appear in users’ streams.
But now it is following in the footsteps of the biggest social networks Facebook and MySpace, which have made themselves essential to their hundreds of millions of users by becoming a channel for multimedia content.
Twitter has already been famous as a channel for pictures: in January 2009 when a plane ditched in the Hudson river in New York, the first pictures of the plane was propogated via Twitter from Twitpic.com, one of a dozen photo-storage sites that have grown up around the microblogging service which launched in 2006.
Sharp-eyed users had noticed that Twitter tested an “inline media” option in July, apparently as part of a test: officially Twitter said then that it was “a small test of a potential … setting for inline media.”
More information can be found at twitter.com/newtwitter – guardian.co.uk