Twitter to test 280-character tweets, doubling current limitation
A select set of Twitter users are being freed from their 140-character shackles, at least temporarily, as the ubiquitous social network tests methods by which users can better express themselves while maintaining the brevity that popularized the platform.
Explained in a blog post on Tuesday, Twitter is doubling the upper tweet limit to 240 characters in a bid to better tailor the service for users who feel constrained by existing constraints.
Penned by Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen and senior software engineer Ikuhiro Ihara, the suggests nuances in the world's written languages played a significant role in Twitter's decision to launch the pilot program. Depending on their native tongue, some users are able to express their thoughts in much less than 140 characters, while others might find the limit too restrictive.
In essence, the change levels the playing field when it comes to logographic languages like Chinese, Korean and, with Kanji, Japanese. Those languages can relay a sentiment with a single character, something that might take multiple words in English or other languages that rely on Roman characters. Twitter calls this phenomenon "cramming."
"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)," Twitter says.
As proof, the company offered up a few tidbits of data, saying that only 0.4 percent of tweets sent in Japanese reach the current 140-character limit. On the other hand, some 9 percent of tweets posted in English hit the maximum. On average, most Japanese tweets are 15 characters in length compared to 34 for English. Further, research shows people who are not impacted by cramming tend to use Twitter more often.
Though it is testing longer tweets, Twitter stands by its commitment to brevity. The evaluation period is meant to gauge consumer interest and what impact, if any, access to longer tweets have on the service's popularity.
Twitter's new 240-character limit is rolling out now to random users in all languages except for Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The company did not specify how long the trial period will last, nor did it reveal an estimated sample set size.
Explained in a blog post on Tuesday, Twitter is doubling the upper tweet limit to 240 characters in a bid to better tailor the service for users who feel constrained by existing constraints.
Penned by Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen and senior software engineer Ikuhiro Ihara, the suggests nuances in the world's written languages played a significant role in Twitter's decision to launch the pilot program. Depending on their native tongue, some users are able to express their thoughts in much less than 140 characters, while others might find the limit too restrictive.
In essence, the change levels the playing field when it comes to logographic languages like Chinese, Korean and, with Kanji, Japanese. Those languages can relay a sentiment with a single character, something that might take multiple words in English or other languages that rely on Roman characters. Twitter calls this phenomenon "cramming."
"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)," Twitter says.
As proof, the company offered up a few tidbits of data, saying that only 0.4 percent of tweets sent in Japanese reach the current 140-character limit. On the other hand, some 9 percent of tweets posted in English hit the maximum. On average, most Japanese tweets are 15 characters in length compared to 34 for English. Further, research shows people who are not impacted by cramming tend to use Twitter more often.
Though it is testing longer tweets, Twitter stands by its commitment to brevity. The evaluation period is meant to gauge consumer interest and what impact, if any, access to longer tweets have on the service's popularity.
Twitter's new 240-character limit is rolling out now to random users in all languages except for Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The company did not specify how long the trial period will last, nor did it reveal an estimated sample set size.
Comments
Not really, it was meant to be no longer than a text message, since it started as an SMS platform. Then it expanded to the web, and caught the smartphone surge in 2007. So the limitation was imposed by the initial technology, and has remained mainly for nostalgia purposes.
Of course, the enforced brevity meant that people did put a lot more thought into what they sent. Well, some of them did. And some people have made the limitation a virtue, but it's only been there for historical reasons (or hysterical raisins).
You might post something not kosher and think it has been accepted but if you use a different browser or different ip address through VPN, you see that your post (ghost post) is not actually visible to the outside world.
One way around this, so far, is to attach a jpg of the text that you want to write (e.g., a screenshot), with the often needed URLs, because many URLs that are not Cabal-approved, never show up on Twitter. Many URLs are a mile long, so I usually use a shorter bit.link URL and so far, so good. I just use politically correct text to introduce my JPG with the real message, and it goes through but the people who want to know my sources, i.e., links, have to copy manually from the JPEG image and this is why you want a short URL.
1) other stuff takes up the characters (URLs, @ name, # hashtags, etc.). They were supposed to exclude those (giving back 140 real characters) but I never really saw it go into effect.
2) if they want Twitter to be interactive, 140 characters is a bit too short for even semi-serious points to be made w/o making it nearly unreadable or breaking things up into multiple tweets.
It can be argued that no matter how long they made it, not everyone would be happy. But, I think the current limit is too short for most people who seriously use the platform.
Thanks Obama!
True. My point was not to mock Apple so much as mock Twitter. And maybe take a slight, sideways dig at Eddy Cue Sorry. I meant Phil Schiller.
And, as I said above, this is more a problem when using Twitter as social media (interacting with others) than it is when you're just pushing out a thought or a link to an article you've recently written. But, the former is really the point of social media, so the length should be determined by the average length needed to correspond, not some tech-spec (like SMS limits).
While the brevity of Twitter is kind of cool, and 'it's thing'... being too brief isn't necessarily good communication.