Twitter's new tweets: videos, photos, gifs won't count toward 140 characters

• New, expanded tweets are nowhere near as dramatic as rumored
• Update comes as social network struggles to attract new users

Twitter debuted longer tweets today, the latest update to the microblogging social network that has struggled to attract new users - and retain the ones it already has.

Media attachments such as photographs, videos, gifs, polls and quoting another tweet will no longer count toward the 140-character limit, the company announced via a gif embedded in a tweet today.