Twitter announced Tuesday that the social media platform would move away from their infamous 140 character limit on their tweets. The new limit will double the old one at 280 characters. This fundamental change leaves twitter fans confused as to what prompted this expanded limit. This site since its beginning has been set on their unchanging 140 character limit.
The Decision to Expand on the 140 Character Limit Comes as a Shock to Many
The official reason Twitter offered up was the difference between languages. English requires more characters to express the same thoughts in a language such as Japanese where single characters can convey an entire word. Twitter claims this change evens out the playing field and allows for every Twitter user to get out a full thought. Twitter argued that this change is not as groundbreaking as it seems. They say that the original 140 character limit comes from the old 160 character limit on SMS text messages, just without the first twenty characters that the username used to take up. In a world where people have a lot to say, a longer limit makes more sense.
This announcement has gotten plenty of mixed reviews. Many are excited about the expansion and feel the change is long overdue. Twitter has slowly been making changes to allow for more text. Recently they started allowing pictures without taking away character count, expanding the 140 character limit is the next obvious move. Other feel this change comes from an odd attempt to keep the platform relevant. They claim that the 140 character count always has almost the point of twitter. It kept thoughts simple and short unlike any other platforms such as Facebook which exceeds a 63,000 character limit. While Twitter has been on a steady decline over the past few years, the small character counts prove to be a turn-off for many users.
This change will not be sudden. Twitter will select random users to try out the new limit before rolling it out for the entire platform. In the coming weeks, Twitter will see the effects of the new limit and the world will decide if this change will be a positive change for Twitter as they try to stay relevant.
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