Twitter breaks the 140 characters limit
Twitter has confirmed that it’s going to allow more than 140 characters on tweets in the coming months. There’s a trick though.
The message itself will continue to be 140 characters long, but Twitter handles at the beginning of a message (@oanasandu writes a post) and photos will no longer be counted down. Links however are considered part of the message so they will contribute to the 140 characters.
Tweets starting with @ will be made visible to everyone, as opposed to only to common friends as was the case until now. You will soon be able to drop the funky looking messages:
“. @ESO builds the E-ELT”
The dot in front of the message was a workaround found by users to make those tweets visible to everyone. This will no longer be necessary.
Pretty useful changes! 
Image source: socialmediatoday
Oana Sandu
Astronomy Communication Guide 