Twitter’s Greatest Gift To Users Is Here
Twitter has just given it’s users one of the best news ever announcing that the limit of 140 characters might change soon as they plan to enable a higher number of characters.
Twitter has said that it has started testing 280-character tweets, double the previous character limit, in a bid to help its users be more expressive. This should be a good news to those who struggle to fit their thoughts into 140 characters.
The company said in a blog post.
“Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people tweeting in English. When people don’t have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people Tweeting — which is awesome!”
Twitter is about brevity, keeping it simple and straight to the point. The 140-character limit started originally to reflect the length of SMS messages which were limited to 160 characters (140 for your tweet and 20 for the username). This constraint encouraged creativity and Twitter quickly became a fast-moving, newsy playground.
This is not the first time Twitter is considering this change. In late 2015, the company considered introducing tweets of up to 10,000 characters, which was to be developed with a new timeline that showed users the best tweets first, as opposed to its chronological, real-time order. This caused some disagreements in the company, but they arrived at a compromise the following year by introducing a timeline that showed the best tweets first and then tweets in the standard reverse-chronological order. It also excluded media attachments and usernames from the character limit.
So if you look at it from this perspective, this change is not as extreme as the other ones the company has considered.
However, with threaded replies, people can finish or continue their thoughts, leaving one to wonder if this change really is necessary and what it will bring.
The company ended by saying:
“We understand since many of you have been Tweeting for years, there may be an emotional attachment to 140 characters – we felt it, too. But we tried this, saw the power of what it will do, and fell in love with this new, still brief, constraint. We are excited to share this today, and we will keep you posted about what we see and what comes next.”
