This article is more than 1 year old

Twitter to upgrade from micro-blogging to milli-blogging with 280 chars

President Trump can now trigger nuclear Armageddon in half the time

Twitter is preparing to double its 140-character limit on tweets to 280 characters.

The microblogging site announced Tuesday that it had begun a trial with a "small group" of twits that would allow for twice as many letters, numbers, and symbols to be placed into each individual tweet.

Not surprisingly, CEO Jack Dorsey is among those who will get to enjoy the roomier tweet constraints, gushing today on his website:

According to product manager Aliza Rosen and senior software engineer Ikuhiro Ihara, the move was influenced in part by Twitter observations on the differences between languages and how users who spoke one language could be more constrained than those using another.

"Sometimes, I have to remove a word that conveys an important meaning or emotion, or I don't send my Tweet at all. But when Iku Tweets in Japanese, he doesn't have the same problem," Rosen explained.

"He finishes sharing his thought and still has room to spare. This is because in languages like Japanese, Korean, and Chinese you can convey about double the amount of information in one character as you can in many other languages, like English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French."

Users, meanwhile, seem to want Twitter, which turned 10 years old last year, to address a few more pressing issues before tackling the character limit:

Twitter did not say when the trials will end or when it can be expected to make a decision on raising the character limit to 280. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like