Twitter is reportedly testing a change on the length of tweets from 140 to 280 characters; according to the social network, the longer 280 characters will be available in select languages, including English, for users to share their thoughts without the usual limit.
While Twitter had earlier made the shirking of 140-character limit easier with a tweak via its latest Android app, to allow users to write out a tweetstorm broken into separate tweets.
Which calls to point that Twitter’s character limit is rather a holdover, as from the early days when tweets were sent as texts, which were limited to 160 characters.
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
The expansion became necessary as it realized the 140-character limit impacted more heavily on those tweeting in some select languages — like English, Spanish, Portuguese or French — as compared with others, like Japanese, Korean and Chinese.
The feature will initially be made available to a small group of users, as Twitter intends to collect data on how the test goes before rolling out the change to all.
