Twitter has announced a major change to the way replies are handled across all platforms – on the web and in iOS and Android apps. Presumably the Mac app will be included as well. Sasank Reddy writes:

Now, when you reply to someone or a group, those @usernames won’t count toward your Tweet’s 140 characters.

With this change, we’ve simplified conversations in a few ways:

• Who you are replying to will appear above the Tweet text rather than within the Tweet text itself, so you have more characters to have conversations.
• You can tap on “Replying to…” to easily see and control who’s part of your conversation.
• When reading a conversation, you’ll actually see what people are saying, rather than seeing lots of @usernames at the start of a Tweet.

One potentially confusing detail worth mentioning: although the usernames of those you reply to will not count against the 140-character limit, if you add any new usernames to the body of your reply, those new mentions will count against your limit.

You can see today’s change in action by watching the following video:

This update is rolling out to all users now. If you haven’t seen it yet, it should be coming to you soon.