Twitter’s famous 140 character limit will likely be relaxed to a slightly more expansive 280 characters. In fact, the change is already there to be experienced by some, who form the initial lot that Twitter is experimenting the enhanced limit with before it is rolled out to everyone else.
Now, this isn’t the first time that Twitter has dabbled with the idea of relaxing the 140 character constraint, with even a 1000 character limit discussed during various stages. However, founder Jack Dorsey had last year categorically announced all of such aren’t going to hold so that the 140 character limit will continue.
That is also how things have been since then though it seems the micro-blogging site this time really wants the limit to go, or doubled, to be precise. The need to limit your tweets to 140 characters has been in force since the inception of the company. That again has to do with the way short messaging services functioned in feature phones which was in vogue when the Twitter came into being.
However, with the world having since transitioned into smartphones allowing even longer messages to be typed and sent easily, the Twitter character limit continued. In fact, that came to be built into the very core of the company’s fundamentals. And users too developed the unique capability of cramming in their thoughts within that many characters.
Twitter though said this proved to be a big disadvantage with those using languages like English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French. In contrast, those tweeting in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese did not seem to be overtly impacted by the constraint as the language allowed them to express more using fewer characters.
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The above has also been proved in a study conducted by Twitter that showed 9 percent of all tweets in English have been impacted by the limit. The same for those tweeting in Japanese is only 0.4 percent. In fact, the majority of Tweets in Japanese max out at just 15 characters while the same for English stands at 34 characters.
Figures don’t lie, and the new 280 character limit should only make things better for those Tweeting in English. Let’s just hope the new feature is rolled out to all soon enough.
