Posted by : Dukes Tuesday 17 October 2017




In the biggest change ever to the social network, Twitter started testing a 280 character maximum length for tweets last week; that’s twice as many as before (in case you didn’t know). At this stage, the test has been described as “open ended” and only open to a small group of users, which may explain why you haven’t seen the change on your own Twitter yet.
The change will be available for all languages with the exception of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean as characters in these languages can communicate twice as much or more information as a single character in other languages.

Twitter Needs New Users

As we know from previous years statistics, Japan has the fourth highest number of Twitter users globally. We also know from previous statistics that user uptake in the USA has mostly stagnated over the past few months. Which leads us to believe that this change may be an attempt to attract more English-speaking users who may have been frustrated by the 140 character limit.
Earlier in the year it was reported that Twitter had made some other changes to their character limit – namely by excluding usernames, photos, videos, GIFs, polls and quoted Tweets from the character limit. But it seems that these changes weren’t enough to make Twitter seem enticing to new users, or to attract old users back to the platform.

The 140 Character Limit Explained

The 140 character limit on tweets is explained by a memorandum to employees from co-founder Jack Dorsey, published in the 2007 book ‘Hatching Twitter’. The note stated “Everyone gets the same amount of space to Twitter, no more confusion or guessing as you are typing”.
However, Twitter users have managed to find loopholes in the character limit since day one. Users are often seen posting images with text or screenshots from their phone’s memo pad, and stringing together multiple tweets in a thread.
Time will only tell what this change to tweet length will spell for the social media platform. Will it spell the second wave of Twitter’s success, or will it alienate their core of loyal users? Only time will tell.

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