Twitter: So easy it’s hard

Did you hear?

Twitter would like you to know that its service is now easier to use, thanks to a series of rule revisions it rolled out last week. Now it’s much simpler to understand what counts towards your 140 characters, as well as which tweets will be seen by your followers, the company says.

I mean, who knew tweeting could be so easy? Now even grandma can figure it out, I’m sure.

Just check out these newer, simpler rules:

• You can only use 140 characters when composing a tweet. (Simplicity at its finest!)
• Oh, except when you’re posting non-text content like videos, GIFs, pictures and polls — those don’t count toward your 140 characters.
• But links still do.
• Quote tweets don’t though. Because even though they’re text, they’re like, old. Old stuff doesn’t count, only new stuff does….I think.
• ANYWAY, @mentions in replies don’t show anymore in the tweet — they’re like, in the header in the user interface or something.
• Yep, so these @mentions won’t count toward the 140 and you can mention up to 50 people.
• But if you want everyone to see your @reply, retweet yourself.
• Right — you can do that now! — retweet yourself.
• And quote yourself.
• If you don’t do that, not everyone will see your @reply.
• Well, I mean if you write a new tweet that starts with an @username that’s like, not technically a reply. So it will been seen by everyone.
• So actually, Twitter is not really changing the rules for who can see your replies — because new tweets that begin with @username mentions aren’t really replies. So the only people who will see your @ reply in their timeline are those who follow you and the person you’re replying to. Like before!
• Which means, I guess, if you want everyone to see your tweet even when they don’t follow both parties you could still use the period before the @username to make that happen….?
• But now you can RT yourself…so I guess Twitter would prefer you did that instead of using the dot @username thing?
• Oh, and use the native retweet…no one writes “RT” anymore.
• Or “MT.”
• But when @usernames are mentioned in tweets, they still count toward your 140 characters like regular words do. (Just not when you’re replying to those @usernames and the @usernames are auto-populated).

SEE? EASY!!