Twitter is making one of the biggest changes to tweet rules since the social network first launched. You will soon be able to tweet images, videos and like without them taking up part of the allowed 140 characters,

That means tweets will be more expressive, even when additional media files are attached.

In addition, names will not count towards the character limit in retweets. This will be especially useful for retweet chains where multiple accounts are included.

Other changes include the ability to retweet or quote your own tweets, so you can republish something from your archives with additional commentary. And any new tweets with a @name included will now be tweeted to all followers.

"One of the biggest priorities for this year is to refine our product and make it simpler," said Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey. "We're focused on making Twitter a whole lot easier and faster. This is what Twitter is great at - what's happening now, live conversation and the simplicity that we started the service with."

The changes will be rolled out over the "coming months" but they have been announced early in order to give developers a chance to update their third-party apps and devices. Twitter, TweetDeck and all of the first party products will be updated in time.