Twitter flips the switch for the new 280 character limit
Today, Twitter has
lifted the 140-character limit for its general users to 280. The micro-blogging
platform first tested the new limit on a select group of Twitter users,
particularly those with large amounts of followers and celebrities. The test
period took place over about six weeks, during which Twitter has collected some
interesting data.
Only 5% of tweets
sent were longer than 140 characters while only 2% were over 190. Mind you,
this data was collected before the limit was changed for the vast majority of
Twitter users. We’d be interested to learn if we’ll see long tweets all the
time, or if people will just keep it short and sweet as they’ve been doing
since Twitter launched.
Twitter’s reasoning for the increase in
character limits is to bring more users who want a bigger canvas to express
themselves more easily. The limit is not being raised for Japanese, Korean, and
Chinese users because these languages has much denser characters in their
languages, thus not requiring them to cram very much.
Anyway, those whose limits have been raised
will see a new circular character limit indicator, which replaces the digital
counter.
Source: gsmarena
