Twitter Doubles Character Limit To 280

KOT have a reason to smile after twitter announced that it is doubling the allotted tweet space to 280 characters.

The social media company announced Tuesday that it was testing long tweets to a select few at the moment.

“We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we’re doing something new: we’re going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming (which is all except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean),” Twitter explained in a blog post.

“Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people Tweeting in English, but it is not for those Tweeting in Japanese,” the company said.

“Although we feel confident about our data and the positive impact this change will have, we want to try it out with a small group of people before we make a decision to launch to everyone.”

If the test is successful, it will amount to one of the biggest changes to its core service in the Twitter’s 11-year history.

The existing 140-character constraint, originally a function of limits in the text message systems on mobile phones, has served as a ruthless enforcer of brevity on the service; at least until the past year or two, when threaded, multitweet “tweetstorms” have become common. It’s not an understatement to say that the limit has shaped a new medium of communication, one built on self-contained bursts of information or opinion that appear rapid-fire in users’ feeds.