Twitter has concluded its beta test of 280 character Tweets and has rolled out the feature to everyone. This comes with a new character counter that replaces the old numerical tracking with a circular meter.
What is interesting is the metrics revealed from the test of the expanded character count. According to Twitter, they had originally found that some nine percent of Tweets in English hit the 140 character limit. This often resulted in Tweets having to be edited to fit within the restriction.
Expanding the limit to 280 characters reduced the number of edited posts down to only one percent. In fact, the blog post from Twitter says that most Tweets don’t go past the original 140 character limit; even if more characters are available. In fact, the data shows that Tweets rarely surpassed 190 characters.
This data was enough to upgrade all users. Allowing people more space to express their views and ideas. Some may think that it dilutes the idea of brevity on the micro-blogging platform, but it might encourage more nuanced thoughts.
[Source: Twitter]
