SAN FRANCISCO – Popular social networking service Twitter has finally decided to increase character limits of a tweet to 280, a test run for which has already begun.
The micro-blogging site, in a blog post, announced on Wednesday.
At the moment, the 280 character limit is not available worldwide, but only for a small group of tech-savvy users.
https://twitter.com/Twitter/status/912783930431905797
Interestingly, users tweeting in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean would still be having 140 characters to tweet as these languages are not ‘impacted by cramming’.
Twitter’s Chief executive Jack Dorsey termed the update a big move for the company while adding that the 140 character limit was an arbitrary choice based on the 160 character limit available for SMS.
https://twitter.com/jack/status/912784057863245824?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Fbusiness-41408798
The tech firm also unveiled some statistics showing why it was important to give more liberty to those tweeting in English and to keep the bar on for Japanese language users.
“We see that a small percent of tweets sent in Japanese have 140 characters (only 0.4%). But in English, a much higher percentage of tweets have 140 characters (9%). Most Japanese Tweets are 15 characters while most English tweets are 34,” it said.
It also highlighted how the same tweet could consume characters in the Japanese language as compared to English and Spanish.
Twitter has yet to announce when all the Twitterati could expect the facility.
