Twitter no longer counts handles in replies


Twitter's Sasanik Reddy:

today we're rolling out another. Now, when you reply to someone or a group, those @usernames won't count toward your Tweet's 140 characters.

This move follows recent changes to no longer count URLs, photos, and quotes against the 140-character limit. Not only will this free up more character space for meaningful words, but also make it more practical to have discussions with more people.

I think these are great changes. The power of Twitter I think is to condense a thought/message into short form. These changes give more value to those characters rather than penalizing thoughts because of long URLs and now handles.