The feature is rolling out to just a select few.
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Twitter is rolling out a change today that could potentially change the landscape of Twitter going forward. The company announced in a blog post that certain users will be able to push their character limit to 280 as early as today. This new 280 character limit is double the current limit of 140 so it will allow for meatier tweets instead of having to worry about trimming down the length.
All of this is being done in an effort to make it easier for English speakers to tweet. The blog post put out by the company today says most tweets in English contain 34 characters while most tweets in Japanese contain just 15 characters. To further get their point across, the blog post mentions nine percent of all English tweets hit the 140 character limit while just 0.4 percent of the tweets in Japanese run into issue. This change would affect all of the world’s languages except Japanese, Chinese and Korean.
However, this change will not be coming to everyone just yet. The company says only a select few will get the try the feature out at first before it rolls out to a wider audience, if it ever does.
“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,” says the blog post. “What matters most is that this works for our community – we will be collecting data and gathering feedback along the way. We’re hoping fewer tweets run into the character limit, which should make it easier for everyone to tweet.”
This is a small change, but a big move for us. 140 was an arbitrary choice based on the 160 character SMS limit. Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence! https://t.co/TuHj51MsTu
— jack (@jack) September 26,2017
Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, has already given us a taste of what to expect if this change does actually occur. It’s unclear whether this change is available for random users or if it will be going to users who regularly run into issues with meeting the current character count. It’s possible the change could affect accounts we see tweeting on a regular basis, like President Trump for example.
An example of 140 character versus 280 characters.
You may start noticing some users on your timeline showcasing the new feature. Having the option to go up to 280 characters will surely mean you’ll see some more meaty tweets instead of the short and sweet messages we’ve come to expect from Twitter. One thing this can help is putting all the information regarding one thought into the same tweet instead of having to break it up into multiple ones.
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