Your tweets just got shorter (from today)

Well, if you include a link in them they have. Did any of you notice?

From today, any tweet that includes a URL (a link to somewhere on the web) will be reduced to 118 characters after the link or, 117 if it was a https link. It’s down to some changes Twitter has made to its t.co link wrapper

Bearing in mind you would normally enter one space either before or after the pasted link to separate it from whatever you wanted to write alongside it, the character drop effectively rises to 3 and 4 characters respectively

It’s not only pasting complete URLs in that loses you the tweet leg room, I’ve just done a couple of tests and it also appears to apply to ‘already shortened’ links too, e.g. links from bitly etc

Twitter first announced this was going to happen on its developer blog back in December 2012

So, a lot less smiley faces at the end of my tweets from now on 😉