Per Bloomberg Twitter will soon exclude counting characters that are part of links or images in order to encourage better tweets. This will make a full 140 character tweet potential available even when you are linking to videos, pictures and websites. The change is expected to happen within the next two weeks.

Earlier this year Twitter was considering the elimination of its 140 character limit but decided against it because that was what made it different than every other communication platform such as Facebook, email or blogs. Cutting links for instance will make available 23 characters which can be used for communicating your thoughts about the included linked content.

It will also encourage users to add more media to their tweets which is something that fits what Twitter executives believe is the mission of Twitter, being a destination for live events and discussion. In a Twitter based poll by USA Today, at the time of this writing, 56% are in favor of this change, 24% are against it and 20% don’t care. I have no idea why 24% of the poll respondents still want their links to reduce the tweet space!

Are you ready for @Twitter to drop links and photos from its 140-character limit? https://t.co/cKfzLz5BKM

— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) May 17, 2016

23 more characters in tweets with links. It's like Christmas for us long-winded microbloggers. https://t.co/ezvyTHBBWP

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) May 17, 2016

By not counting links & photos to 140 character limit, Twitter effectively will turn tweets into captions. Smart: https://t.co/0qWSULoebx

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) May 16, 2016

I love that it's taken until May 2016 for Twitter to figure out that links & images shouldn't count against tweets. https://t.co/uXi78PPV3V

— Paul Kedrosky (@pkedrosky) May 16, 2016