Twitter has been majorly known for its brevity, and this comes from its 140 character limit policy. That, however, is about to change as the social media giant announced yesterday that it would soon be rolling out 280 character tweet feature.
Daily Mail UK reports that Twitter said on Tuesday that it would begin a test with a random sample of users allowing them to send tweets that are as long as 280 characters, double the existing cap, in most languages around the world.
The tech company has stood by its short messaging template in the past but the company said it was trialing the new system as it said users tweeting in English and Spanish struggled to express themselves.
In a blog announcement, Twitter said just 0.4 per cent of tweets sent in Japanese have 140 characters, compared to nine per cent of English language tweets.
The trial will be rolled out to a ‘small group of people’ and will run for an unspecified number of weeks in all languages expect Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The company declined to say how many people would be included in the test.
Aliza Rosen, product manager for Twitter, and Ikuhiro Ihara, senior software engineer for the website, wrote in a joint blogpost: ‘Trying to cram your thoughts into a Tweet – we’ve all been there, and it’s a pain.
‘Interestingly, this isn’t a problem everywhere people Tweet. For example, when I (Aliza) Tweet in English, I quickly run into the 140 character limit and have to edit my Tweet down so it fits.
‘Sometimes, I have to remove a word that conveys an important meaning or emotion, or I don’t send my Tweet at all.’
They added that Twitter still aimed to be about ‘brevity’ and that there has been an ’emotional attachment’ to the 140-character limit, which the site has used since its launch in 2006.
‘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,’ the two employees wrote.
The 140-character limit was based around the SMS text limit, which was 160 character. Chief Exectuive Jack Dorsey wanted a limit just below the SMS limit.
The character limit on Direct messages, which are sent privately between users, were scrapped earlier this year.
Images and other media attachments, such as GIFs, were also removed from the limit too in a bid to broaden the products appeal.
It also stopped counting images and other media attached to tweets as part of the character limit in an attempt to improve the service.
And in 2015, the site was conducting tests which would introduce tweets of up to 10,000 characters, according to reports.
Despite its popularity, the social media website has been crippled financially, reporting a loss of £86million ($116 million) and zero growth in the number of users, at 328 million people. In comparison, Facebook has 2 billion users.
