Twitter expands character limit to 280 for users

Twitter on Wednesday said that users can use 280 characters now — instead of the earlier limit of 140 characters — to express their views on the platform.

For India and the Indian diaspora, the update will apply to the six regional languages supported on the platform — Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi and Tamil, Twitter said.

This is part of Twitter's move to allow most of its users to tweet using Twitter 280 characters.

Japanese, Korean, and Chinese will continue to have 140 characters because cramming is not an issue in these languages, Twitter said in a blogpost.

Twitter had 330 million monthly users at the end of September 2017 quarter. It does not divulge country-specific numbers.

In September, Twitter launched a test that expanded the 140-character limit.

"Twitter saw when people needed to use more than 140 characters, they Tweeted more easily and more often," Twitter Product Manager Aliza Rosen said in the blogpost. She added that Twitter is making this change after listening and observing a problem its global community was facing in terms of tweeting.

This is part of Twitter's move to allow most of its users to tweet using 280 characters.

Japanese, Korean, and Chinese will continue to have 140 characters because cramming is not an issue in these languages, Twitter said in a blogpost.

Twitter had 330 million monthly users at the end of September 2017 quarter. It does not divulge country-specific numbers.

In September, Twitter launched a test that expanded the 140-character limit.

"Twitter saw when people needed to use more than 140 characters, they Tweeted more easily and more often," Twitter Product Manager Aliza Rosen said in the blogpost. She added that Twitter is making this change after listening and observing a problem its global community was facing in terms of tweeting.

Social media site Twitter is trialling longer, 280-character limits to help users "easily express themselves". At first glance this announcement might seem like nothing but a nice new feature. But this new step exemplifies two ways in which Twitter continues to tread a fine line between success and failure.

Firstly, what this move demonstrates is how difficult it is to get the balance between being distinctive and having to move closer to the features that rivals offer. Secondly, the new measure heaps new problems onto an unstable business model that keeps Twitter unprofitable.

In the announcement of more space for longer messages, Aliza Rosen, Twitter’s product manager and Ikuhiro Ihara, the senior software engineer, argued that some languages need more characters to express a message than others. Confident that most users won’t have a basis for comparison, they proposed that giving a larger space for messages to some English-language users will stem frustration at the traditional limit. But their post immediately contains a giveaway contradiction:

Twitter is about brevity. It’s what makes it such a great way to see what’s happening. Tweets get right to the point with the information or thoughts that matter. That is something we will never change.

This contradiction is at the heart of the dilemma that all social media platforms face. If successful in attracting users, they have to offer something distinctive. Yet as new rivals enter the scene they have to innovate and this usually means adopting features others have borrowed. It’s easy to forget that, for some years after its roll-out in 2006, it was impossible to include an image with a tweet – you could only link to a picture hosted elsewhere and you had to be careful over how long URLs were.

But as people became used to the greater flexibility of Facebook and then Instagram, Twitter too had to offer opportunities to include images, links and videos. The truth is that the 140 character limitation has long gone.

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