Twitter testing 280 character limit

James Delahunty
27 Sep 2017 0:02

Twitter has announced that it is testing a 280 character limit for tweets for selected users, doubling the ever-present 140 character limit.
Explaining the trial, Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen said that for some languages, 140-characters is a much more limiting factor than others, comparing English to Japanese and how the latter can convey more information in one character.
"We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we're doing something new: we're going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming (which is all except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean)."
Right now, only a small group are able to tweet more than 140 characters, and of course, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is one of them.

Twitter's 140 character limit was based on the 160-character limit for SMS text messages, with the 20 character deficit being reserved for username information. Nowadays, enforcing a limit for that technical reason doesn't make much sense, but Twitter also wants to continue to keep tweets brief.
More Info: Twitter