Twitter on Tuesday said it was testing a 280-character limit for tweets on its platform. On its blog, the social media company said the longer character limit has been made available only to a small group of users at present, on a trial basis. Currently, the limit is 140 characters.
The company said that the new character limit was being tested for languages “impacted by cramming”, by which it meant all languages except Japanese, Chinese and Korean. “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,” read the blog.
Twitter Product Manager Aliza Rosen said that while only 0.4% of tweets sent in Japanese have 140 characters, the corresponding figure for tweets in English is 9%. “Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people tweeting in English, but it is not for those tweeting in Japanese,” she added.
However, Rosen did not provide a timeline for the trials of the 280-character word limit, or confirm the implementation of such a feature permanently.
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