Twitter testing 280-character Tweet limit

By Anuj Sharma - September 27, 2017
twitter 280 limit
Currently, the 280-character tweet limit is available to a small group of Twitter’s 328 million users but soon will be rolled out globally to all users.

Want to express a thought on Twitter but ran out of the 140-character limit? We have all been there, and it’s a pain. But now, Twitter has decided to put an end to that pain and has begun testing 280-character limit in Tweets.

According to Aliza Rosen and Ikuhiro Ihara from Twitter's team, "when Aliza Tweets in English, I quickly run into the 140 character limit and have to edit the Tweet down so it fits".

But when Ikuhiro Tweets in Japanese, he doesn’t have the same problem. He finishes sharing his thought and still has room to spare. This is because in languages like Japanese, Korean, and Chinese you can convey about double the amount of information in one character as you can in many other languages, like English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French.

And Twitter wants every person around the world to easily express themselves, so the company started trying out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming (which is all except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean).

Currently, the 280-character tweet limit is available to a small group of Twitter’s 328 million users but soon will be rolled out globally to all users.

“Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people Tweeting in English, but it is not for those Tweeting in Japanese. Also, in all markets, when people don’t have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people Tweeting – which is awesome,” said Twitter in a blog post.

Twitter is also said to be experimenting a tweetstorm feature that will let you compose your tweets ahead of time and Twitter will publish them simultaneously.

Tweetstorm is expected to have a graphic user interface and with this feature Twitter could make long emotions/thoughts accessible to everyone.

The feature is yet to be announced and is still not clear as to when it will see the light of the day. Currently, composing a thread simply means replying to the previously published Tweet. Chaining replies like this can take a long with the chances of screwing up especially if you keep replying to the original tweet in the chain. Thus, tweetstorm if rolled out, could ease the entire process.

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