Sharing a link? Twitter just cut your character limit

Are you a Twitter addict who shares every interesting link you see? You’re going to have to be more concise in future: from today onwards, you’re not going to have the full 140-characters to play with.

As Twitter announced back in December, it is making some changes to how its t.co link wrapper works, which will involve using up more of your precious characters. It is extending the maximum length of wrapped links shared on the service from 20 to 22 characters for non-https URLs, and 21 to 23 characters for https URLs, essentially meaning you can include two less characters in your link-heavy tweet.

No, shorteners won’t help — even typing in a really tiny URL won’t result in extra characters. For example, sharing a non-https URL (like the 20-character bit.ly shortlink below) may technically use fewer characters than the 22 character limit — but the changes mean that only 118 characters will remain in the tweet instead of the previous 120.

Any applications that use the t.co wrapper had until today to make the necessary changes to their app to accommodate the extended link size.