27 Sep Twitter Has Announced That It’s Doubling The Signature 140 Character Limit

Ever since Twitter was launched in 2006, the social media website’s unique selling point has been its brevity. Twitter is now popular with casual users, celebrities, and journalists alike thanks to its ability to allow them to communicate in 140 characters or less.

Why 140 characters? Well, 160 characters was the maximum number that could be used in a text message in dark days gone by. So Twitter reserved 20 characters for each username and 140 for Tweets that could easily be sent and received on mobile devices.

Whilst Twitter’s design has been modified sightly over the years, the website’s maximum Tweet length has never changed. But it was announced this Tuesday that a 280-character limit for Tweets is being tested – sending users of the microblogging site into meltdown.

“Although we feel confident about our data and the positive impact this change will have, we want to try it out with a small group of people before we make a decision to launch to everyone,” Twitter Product Manager Aliza Rosen and Senior Software Engineer Ikuhiro Ihara wrote.

So why is this change being introduced? Well, it’s all down to Twitter’s popularity. In 2006, the website was predominately used by English speaking people, but now over 60 different languages are used on the website. More characters would help people who speak different languages Tweet.

Bizarrely, one of the languages with users who feel restrained by the current character limit is English. Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen said, “Sometimes, I have to remove a word that conveys an important meaning or emotion, or I don’t send my Tweet at all.”

Whereas Japanese speaking user, Ihara, doesn’t have this problem and said, “In languages like Japanese, Korean, and Chinese you can convey about double the amount of information in one character as you can in many other languages, like English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French.”

In addition to this, Twitter’s marketing team have discovered that an increased number of characters could increase the site’s popularity. “When people don’t have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people Tweeting,” it was revealed.

However, Twitter users were more than a little upset by this proposed change…

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