Tired of cramming all your witty thoughts into 140 characters? Well, stress no more – Twitter is doubling its character limit and giving you 280 characters to express how you feel about current events, your mother-in-law or even your morning latte.
The social media giant introduced the new policy in a blog post Tuesday.
“We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we’re doing something new: we’re going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming,” said Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen.
This is a small change, but a big move for us. 140 was an arbitrary choice based on the 160 character SMS limit. Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence! https://t.co/TuHj51MsTu
— jack (@jack) September 26, 2017
Rosen said that part of what spurred on the change was that in languages like Japanese, where one character conveys much more information than it does in English, users weren’t expressing the same frustration about too-short character limits. Nine per cent of all English tweets hit the 140-character limit while only 0.4 per cent of Japanese tweets do.
In her post, Rosen noted that the expanded character limit will only be available to a small trial group at first.
