Twitter experiments with increased 280 character limit for tweets

Twitter’s 140 character limit has long been the source of users’ greatest frustrations in using the social network over alternatives like Facebook and Google+. In a weird way, it was also one of Twitter’s greatest strengths, putting an emphasis on brevity and forcing users to keep posts quick and snackable.

That hasn’t stopped most users from seeing the character limit as a curse, especially when it means occasionally butchering grammar in an effort to squeeze in as many words as possible into a single tweet. But that might soon change…

Twitter announced today that they’re experimenting with doubling the previous 140 character limit to 280 for a select group of users. They’re not committing to rolling this out to everyone, but they’re certainly thinking about it.

This is a small change, but a big move for us. 140 was an arbitrary choice based on the 160 character SMS limit. Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence! https://t.co/TuHj51MsTu

— jack (@jack) September 26, 2017

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey talked a little bit about the move in his own tweet, with a blog post talking about the differences in languages motivating the changes. In an effort to avoid discriminating against English speakers — which need more characters to convey the same thoughts — the 280 character limit was created. We’ll have to wait and see where things go from here and while this is a great start, let’s be real — we’d all much rather have the ability to edit tweets.

via Twitter