Press/ Twitter
Twitter Doubles Tweet Limit to 280 Characters
Bye Twitter brevity
Twitter Inc. said on Tuesday that users can send tweets with as many as 280 characters, double the current limit, the latest attempt by the social media company to revive anemic user growth.
The roll-out includes all languages except Japanese, Korean and Chinese. Twitter said those Asian languages can convey about double the amount of information in one character compared with many other languages.
The 140-character limit is a relic of a previous technological era. That was the maximum that could fit in mobile text messages when the service started in 2006, before the mass adoption of smartphones.
What It Means:
Twitter started testing the longer tweet limit with a small group of users in September and found that people with the expanded character limit spent less time editing their tweets. “Those people also got more followers, spent more time on the platform and interacted more with other users on the service.”