Twitter doubles character limit to 280

The tweets of your friends, frenemies, favorite celebrities, and hate follows can now be twice as long. Twitter has begun testing 280-character limit to tweets. The social network claims only nine percent of all tweets right now are exactly 140 characters and that users have to edit their initial thoughts to fit under the original limit. Twitter claims it hopes to lessen the burden on “languages impacted by cramming,” which is most languages except for the likes of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, and have people tweet more. Now, we can’t say whether this will improve the quality of tweets or not. The 140-character limit was initially set to reflect SMS message length.

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

Source: The Verge