Twitter’s famous 140 character limit is finally on the way out, ending months of speculations and rumors on the same. The company stated the new limit has been set at 280 characters and it is now applicable to all Twitter users anywhere in the world.
So far, the enhanced 280 character limit was being tested on a limited scale in September. Based on the feedback from the above exercise, the micro blogging site will henceforth be allowing for twice the character count to ensure users get to have the liberty to express themselves without inhibitions.
However, the enhanced limit of 280 characters will not be applicable to the Japanese, Korean and Chinese languages. Twitter explained the move saying the above languages require very few characters to express a thought process, which is quite unlike other popular languages like English.
As such, while the Japanese, Korean and Chinese users of Twitter were found least concerned with the 140 character limit, those using other languages were often found cramming their tweets to fit within the limit. This also led to the development of unique methods and techniques of arrangements of letters, numerals, and characters to fit within the character restriction.
In fact, those can well be considered as a further evolution of the English language in the digital space and age, something that is also often seen in other spheres where users need to cram anything lengthy within a smaller space.
However, as Twitter said, users often were found having to make several attempts trying to publish a single Tweet owing to the character restrictions or deleting it altogether in some cases. Those won’t likely be the case anymore.
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Interestingly, Twitter also said it is just about 5 percent users whose tweets were longer than 140 characters even though they had access to the 280 character limit. Also, it is only 2 percent of the tweets that were found to be longer than 190 characters, which shows users seem to continue sticking to the core feature of Twitter, that of its 140 character limit.
