Roger Fingas
Twitter on Tuesday brought a doubled 280-character limit on tweets out of limited testing, making the change official across most countries where the social network operates.
In announcing the move, Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen downplayed concerns about massive tweets cluttering feeds, noting that while about 9 percent of English tweets hit the 140-character limit, only 1 percent of tweets hit the expanded limit during testing. Instead, people simply posted faster because they didn't have to whittle down text, Rosen said.
Roughly 5 percent of posts were longer than 140 characters, and just 2 percent were over 190, she added. People who did have more room to write are said to have picked up extra likes, retweets, mentions, and followers, and spent on more time on Twitter.
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean tweets will continue to be limited to 140 characters because those languages are more expressive, Twitter said. A single character can often represent a complete thought.
Twitter has struggled to meaningfully grow its user base in the past couple of years, and has adopted a variety of tactics, including taking a tougher stance on harassment.
More recently the company has been implicated as a target for Russian influence during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently appeared on NBC to discuss the issue, saying that political ads were less significant than fabricated news stories. Apple curates its own news in the form of the Apple News app.
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12 Comments
Considering the importance of the vast majority of tweets, wouldn't 28 characters be more appropriate?
Wow. They still haven't added the two largest improvements needed: 1) eliminate the 'to:addressees' from total character count and 2) the ability to edit postings. :/
I'm pretty happy about this change, as while 140 characters was novel, it was sometimes hard to have an actual conversation (***social*** media?) in such brief chunks. It wouldn't have even had to be 280 characters, as often just another few words would do it. Plus, they never really seemed to remove the characters taken up by URLs or @ mentions, etc.
This still keeps it brief, but allows a bit less textual-gymnastics. Also, a bit of extra space at least opens up the possibility for more clarity or intention... which **might** help avoid unnecessary commotion.
This doesn't solve Twitter's problems though. They really need a way to make some income without turning it into an even bigger mess. Heck, I'd pay some reasonable amount per month if it would help clean up some of the baloney (i.e.: real authenticated users, limit/kill the automation, etc.).
We have sufficient evidence that tweeters were fully capable of conveying their stupidity in 140 characters or less. Opening up the window of stupidity to 280 characters doesn't really change a thing.
Maybe with the extra characters twits will start making complete sentences and use correct spelling...HA!