A first since the company’s inception
Twitter has always been known as a micro blogging site, forcing its users to be concise with their thoughts because of their unique 140 character limit. But the company has now increased that limit to 280 characters, a first since the company’s inception more than a decade ago in 2006.
Why the change? Well, English users apparently hit the 140 character limit more often compared to Korean, Chinese and Japanese users. Because of the compact nature of these languages, they’re able to cram in more thoughts into one tweet compared to English-speaking users. The 140 character limit was imposed back when tweeting via SMS was still a thing, obviously that’s no longer a big concern in 2017.
The change isn’t rolling out to everyone just yet – Twitter will be testing the new 280 character limit with a select group of people first, before completely rolling it out to the user base.
