Twitter to Test Expanding Character Limit per Tweet
- by Nancy Warren
- in Research
- — Sep 27, 2017
The tweets in your timeline are about to get super-sized. Because it is mostly in English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French that the 140 character limit seems to cause sometimes concern to the users, in contrast to those who tweet in japanese, Korean, or chinese.
Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen and senior software engineer Ikuhiro Ihara said in a blog their research shows while the character limit frustrates those tweeting in English, it's not so much an issue for those tweeting in Japanese, Chinese and Korean. It remains to be seen whether this is enough to placate staunch defenders of the 140-character limit, or whether Twitter instead stumbled upon a way to offend even more people with these tests. The platform that has kept us stuck with a brief 140-character limit since its start-that is, until now. This suggests that users likely feel that they must edit their commentary or thoughts down in order to get their message across.
"Most Japanese tweets are 15 characters, while most English tweets are 34", it said. Under Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, the San Francisco company has flirted time and again with lifting its character limit as it falls farther behind Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat in the competition for users and advertisers.
Until now, Tweets had been limited to 140 characters in length.
Whether or not Twitter will ultimately roll this out to everyone remains to be seen. As it could discourage people from attempting to read "lengthy" tweets in the first place. Ultimately, the company arrived at a series of compromises.
His partner Biz Stone states that the limit of the original was 160 sign less the user name. It also expanded tweets by not counting media attachments against the character limit.
For a company that has struggled with growth, developing a more engaged community is a must. In languages where people have more room to express themselves, more people tweet.
She did not say which users would take part in the 280 character tweet trial. Yes, it is because it is 280-characters long (effectively two times the 140-characters we are used to).
We'll soon find out. "I don't know if I will be able to alter this to 280".
Less than half a percent of Tweets sent in Japanese use the full 140 characters whereas 9 percent of English Tweets hit that limit. The company stresses that it isn't doing away with brevity on the platform: "That is something we will never change", it says.
