Twitter reveals big changes ahead

Twitter's rolling out some big changes (Getty)
Twitter's rolling out some big changes (Getty)

Good news, narcissists of Twitter -- soon you'll be able to retweet yourself.

It's one of a number of changes the microblogging site is making "in the coming months".

"We'll be enabling the retweet button on your own tweets, so you can easily retweet or quote tweet yourself when you want to share a new reflection or feel like a really good one went unnoticed," Twitter product manager Todd Sherman wrote on the company's official blog.

The biggest change though is that usernames, polls, GIFs, videos, quoted tweets and images will no longer use up any characters, leaving the entire 140-character limit for your witticisms, not to mention correct grammar and punctuation.

Another big change is that when you're writing a new tweet beginning with @, all your followers will be able to see it -- not just those who follow both you and the person you're tweeting at.

If you're replying to a previous tweet however, it'll stay semi-private. Twitter says if you want those tweets to be seen by all your followers, rather than use the '.@' convention, just retweet yourself.

Because usernames will no longer take up any characters, Twitter has implemented a limit of 50 on any one tweet.

It's not clear just yet when the changes will be rolled out.

"Today, we're notifying you and our developers, so that everything works as it should when we roll these changes out. The updates have a significant impact on tweets, so we want to provide our developer partners with time to make any needed updates to the hundreds of thousands of products built using Twitter's API."

Reaction has been positive, with tech site The Next Web praising the death of "the terrible '.@mention' feature" and Kotaku calling the changes "mostly good".

The latter however did express concern people would abuse the 50-username limit.

"Twitter has an awful track record with mitigating harassment on its service; it's still a dangerous and uncomfortable place for large swaths of minority groups," wrote Patrick Klepek.

"This change seems to give Twitter's worst some useful tools to make it easier to harass users simultaneously."

Twitter's last big change was getting rid of stars and replacing them with hearts in November last year.

Newshub.