Twitter’s 140-character limit has been one of the platform’s defining characteristics over the years. The idea is to allow users to post short messages and updates, versus lengthy blog posts, and has helped separate Twitter from other social media platforms, but it seems that starting today, that 140-character limit has since been doubled.In a post on its blog, Twitter has announced that they will be rolling out a new limit to all of its users where the cap has been raised from 140-characters to 280-characters. According to Aliza Rosen, the Product Manager at Twitter, the goal of the 280-character tweet is to allow users to better express themselves, which based on their findings was exactly what happened.
This follows a trial period from back in September in which Twitter allowed a select few users to tweet 280-character limit tweets. According to Rosen, “People in the experiment told us that a higher character limit made them feel more satisfied with how they expressed themselves on Twitter, their ability to find good content, and Twitter overall.”
Note that this change will only apply to languages in which “cramming” was an issue, such an English. Twitter notes on its blog that languages such as Japanese, Korean, and Chinese will still have a 140-character limit. More details can be found on Twitter’s website.
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