Heads up: Twitter reducing tweet size to 117 characters

If you’ve been struggling to contain your tweets down to 140 characters, here’s something that will affect you: Twitter has warned users to prepare for even shorter character limits in the New Year.

In a blog post, Twitter recently gave a ‘head up’ to its hundreds of millions of users, warning them that it will be trimming the tweet size down to 117 characters for tweets containing a URL link.

The popular social media site will be lengthening the character limit of its URL wrapper by two characters, meaning some tweets will now only be afforded a 117-character limit.

“To give everyone enough time to update their applications, this change won’t go into effect for two months – so please consider this a heads up,” Twitter developer Jason Costa (@jasoncosta) wrote in a blog post.

According to the post, background work for the new paradigm will begin taking effect on February 6, 2013. “Two weeks later on February 20th, 2013, we will begin generating and returning t.co URLs with this new maximum length. Ensure that your application is prepared to handle this change by that date,” the post reads.

T.co is used by Twitter to automatically shorten links and allow users to post URLs into their tweets without sending its entire length. As it stands, HTTP URLs would take up 20 characters of a tweet, whereas HTTPS URLs need 21. Once the update has been rolled out, however, they will comprise 22 and 23 characters, respectively.

You’ve been warned.