It’s here. The time has come and Twitter has finally alleviated one of the biggest headaches people face when they use the microblogging site: Its word count.
Before you get too excited, though, Twitter isn’t removing the character limit, but they are doubling the 140 character limit to a whopping 280 characters. Twitter says they’re rolling this out globally but only a small group of people right now will be able to enjoy this new feature.
How can you tell if your account has been selected? Well, besides the obvious perk of being able to tweet longer, you will see some UI changes too. If you have unlocked the 280 character limit, the character limit icon will change to a circle which will then gradually fill and change colour from green to red indicating how close you are to the limit.
However, while this rollout is global, right now, users who tweet in Japanese, Chinese and Korean will not see this increase in character limit. This is because you can convey more with fewer characters in those languages. Besides that, Twitter’s statistics also show that most Japanese tweets end at 15 characters with only a tiny 0.4% of tweets reaching the 140 character mark. In contrast, 9% of all tweets in English reach the 140 character mark — which probably means there was a lot of editing was done to trim thoughts down — with most English tweets hitting the 34 character mark.
While this change is probably for the better, some question if it will impact one of Twitter’s defining characteristics: Sharing thoughts in brevity. Twitter acknowledges these concerns in their blog post and said that despite emotional attachments to the 140-character limit, they’ve tried it out internally and they fell in love with it too.
That said, you may not see this update hit your account until much later. For us here at SoyaCincau.com, none of our personal Twitter accounts have the new limit yet, but SoyaCincau’s official Twitter account (@Soya_Cincau) already has access to the 280-character limit.
Needless to say, we’re stoked about this because it makes live-tweeting events for you guys so much easier.
But, although we think this is a nice feature, Twitter has yet to address the other big headache of their microblogging platform: Why can’t we edit our tweets?? C’mon Twitter, it’s 2017.
What do you guys think of the 280-character limit? Let us know in the comments below.
