Twitter makes it a little easier to tweet

If you've ever found yourself using "creative" spelling to try to cram a pithy reply in 140 characters on Twitter, things are about to get a bit easier.

Not only is the social platform taking gifs and photographs out of the 140 character count, but it will also remove usernames from the final total too. That gives you an additional  24 characters for a photograph and up to 15 characters for a username, and suddenly you have a lot more to play with.

Reports that Twitter was planning to loosen the restriction on the character count surfaced last week, with Bloomberg claiming the company was on the verge of discounting links and images. Twitter also said it would make new tweets beginning with an @name visible to all followers, and also allow users to quote their own tweets to add extra comentary if needed.

The changes will take place in the coming months, giving developers the chance to tweak their products.

"One of the biggest priorities for this year is to refine our product and make it simpler," said chief executive Jack Dorsey.

“We’re focused on making Twitter a whole lot easier and faster. That’s what Twitter is great at - what’s happening now, live conversation and the simplicity that we started the service with.”

Twitter has been struggling with how to grow its user numbers, with 310 million active users compared with Facebook’s 1.6 billion. Earlier this year Twitter made changes to how it displays users’ timelines, giving users the option to give prominence to the tweets they were most likely to care about.

Earlier this year, there was speculation that Twitter was planning to remove the character limit altogether, with reports that it would allow tweets up to 10,000 characters in length. But Mr Dorsey said brevity and speed was still important to the service.

“We’re not giving up on the idea of Twitter being in the moment,” he said. “That concept of brevity, speed and live conversation - being able to think of something and put it out to the world instantly - that’s what’s most important.”