If you think 140 characters is restrictive, well…you not the only one. Here’s a good news though: Twitter is now testing an increased character limit of 280-characters for selected users, as part of a project as in effort to give users ‘more ways to express themselves’.
As the story goes, the original 140-character limit was developed as Twitter was originally based on SMS technology, which only goes up to 160 characters. According to Twitter’s research, about 9% of tweets made in languages using the Roman alphabet hits the character limit.
However, only 0.4% of tweets in Chinese, Korean and Japanese hits the same limit, thanks to the double the amount of information in a character. With that, the new character limit might be able to help users that converse in languages impacted by cramming.
Naturally, this might change the way users utilize Twitter. Of course, this is not the first time the company has did so since it has previously excluded images and links as part of the 140-character limit. Twitter has also removed the limits on Direct Messages to improve communications between users.
Perhaps, there will be shorter multi-tweet threads with this new move. Now if only Twitter allows editing within a tweet.
(Source: Twitter Blog )
