Twitter is mulling an amendment to one of its claims to fame.

On Sept. 27 the company’s official account tweeted that it will experiment with increasing the character limit to a tweet from 140 to 280 characters.

The move appears to be part of an effort to get people to tweet more. Two Twitter product managers, Aliza Rosen and Ikuhiro Ihara, wrote on the company’s official blog that “when people don’t have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people Tweeting – which is awesome!”

Only a select group of Twitter users will see their character limits increased, they add. It’s not clear how many people will be included in the test, or how they are chosen. A spokesman for Twitter says it will be rolled out to a random sample of people, and it’s not decided if and when it will reach all users.

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone each explained the decision for the test on Twitter, in tweets that each exceeded the standard 140-character limit.

Newcomers to the social network are often baffled by Twitter’s 140 character limit. But many power users hail it as one of the key reasons why Twitter is an effective tool for sharing and collecting information. The forced brevity requires one to carefully formulate ideas before sharing them with the world, so goes one argument. It also makes digesting an onslaught of tweets easier.

Unsurprisingly, many devoted Twitter users did not welcome the news. And several expressed concern over what such a change would mean for president Trump’s tweeting habits.

Twitter is under intense pressure to improve its financials and please investors. Its most recent earnings report revealed that it added no new users over the quarter ending through June 2017. That bodes poorly for the company’s business, as potential advertisers will likely send their money to a healthier social network—namely Facebook. The company’s quarterly revenue has dropped this year when compared to the same time periods in 2016.

Twitter seems convinced that increasing its character limit help attract a larger audience. Its existing users, however, are not. Given how Twitter has a habit of hiring executives that don’t use Twitter themselves, it might be wise for the company to listen to people that do.</s>CLOSE Twitter is testing its new character limit with a select group of users. USA TODAY

Twitter in 140 characters (left) and in 280 characters (right). (Photo: Twitter)

SAN FRANCISCO — Expressing yourself in 140 characters is a skill cultivated the world over by millions of Twitter users. Now a small group of them will be able to say twice as much in a single tweet.

The struggling social media service is experimenting with doubling its famous character limit to 280 characters, beginning with a test group. Twitter says it's a random sample of users, so it's hard to tell if the nation's tweeter-in-chief, Donald Trump, will get a shot at longer winded presidential proclamations.

The experiment is a long time coming. Under Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, the San Francisco company has flirted time and again with lifting its character limit as it falls farther behind Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat in the competition for users and advertisers. In its most recent quarter, Twitter reported sales fell and user growth stalled as an earlier "Trump bump" faded.

"In a world where attention spans are falling, the beauty of Twitter was the short and high impact nature of the content," Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co. analyst James M. Cakmak said in a research report.

Cakmak says he doesn't believe longer tweets will bring new people to the service or get the people already using it to tweet more.

"We’ve seen little traction in changing the value proposition for prospective users, including this move," he said.

Any discussion of relaxing the character count has made many Twitter die-hards cringe. Since its founding, strict word economy has been Twitter's most distinctive feature and, for some, its most frustrating.

The enforced brevity can perfectly distill an idea. Cramming a complex thought into 140 characters can also be darn near impossible, coming at the expense of proper grammar, spelling and punctuation, not to mention nuance.

Twitter users have come up with all kinds of innovative ways to escape the character limit chains, from posting screenshots to tweet storms. But some users never felt the need.

Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen says when she tweets in English, she has to edit her tweet down so it will squeeze into the allotted space, removing key words that convey meaning or emotion.

When Twitter senior software engineer Ikuhiro Ihara tweets in Japanese, he can share his thoughts with plenty of room to spare.

That's because characters in languages such as Japanese, Korean and Chinese have double the amount of information than those in many other languages such as English, Spanish and French. Only 0.4% of tweets in Japanese have 140 characters versus a much higher percentage of tweets in English, for example.

Turns out aggravating users isn't especially good for business. In languages where people have more room to express themselves, more people tweet. And that's something that Twitter desperately needs more of.

So it's planning to extend the character limit to all languages except Japanese, Chinese and Korean.

"We understand since many of you have been Tweeting for years, there may be an emotional attachment to 140 characters — we felt it, too," Rosen and Ihara wrote in a blog post. "But we tried this, saw the power of what it will do, and fell in love with this new, still brief, constraint."

Do you love it or hate it? Let us know what you think of 280 characters in the comments or tweet @USATODAYtech.

Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2yr72n7</s>Originally, our constraint was 160 (limit of a text) minus username. But we noticed @biz got 1 more than @jack. For fairness, we chose 140. Now texts are unlimited. Also, we realize that 140 isn't fair—there are differences between languages. We're testing the limits. Hello 280! — Biz Stone (@biz) September 26, 2017

Twitter today announced that it is going to "try out" a longer character limit, doubling the current 140-character limit to 280 characters.The 280 character limit is going to be available in languages that are "impacted by cramming," aka all languages aside from Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.According to Twitter, most tweets in English have 34 characters while most tweets in Japanese have 15 characters, and Twitter users tweeting in English hit the 140-character limit more often, which can be a "major cause of frustration."Twitter says the new character limit is "only available to a small group" of users at the current time as it gathers data and feedback on the impact of the change. It won't roll out to all users until Twitter is sure that it "works" for the Twitter community, but Twitter is hoping 280 characters will "make it easier for everyone to Tweet."Twitter has had a 140-character limit in place since the service first launched in 2006, so a character expansion is a major change to the way Twitter works.Before considering a character limit expansion, Twitter made several other changes to give customers more room to share their thoughts. Starting in 2016, photo attachments, GIFs, polls, and other media stopped counting towards the 140-character limit, and in March, usernames no longer counted towards the limit.Customers randomly selected to be part of Twitter's beta testing group will be able to use 280 characters in their tweets starting today.</s>Twitter is expanding its character limit on text posts from 140 to 280 characters with a small subset of users as part of a “test” — but the change is expected to roll out to all users soon.

Twitter made the announcement on its official blog:

“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).”

Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, tweeted the announcement with a tweet utilizing the new character limit:

Twitter addressed users who will be upset by the change:

“Twitter is about brevity. It’s what makes it such a great way to see what’s happening. Tweets get right to the point with the information or thoughts that matter. That is something we will never change. We understand since many of you have been Tweeting for years, there may be an emotional attachment to 140 characters – we felt it, too. But we tried this, saw the power of what it will do, and fell in love with this new, still brief, constraint. We are excited to share this today, and we will keep you posted about what we see and what comes next.”</s>Time reports Twitter is considering doubling it’s character limit to 280!

Twitter says “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.”

This feature is currently only available to a few at this time, and not available in Japanese, Chinese and Korean.

I have to admit, I often wish Twitter offered more characters. Reading correctly at a glance would be easier for many.

An article from Forbes says Twitter is behind times with little change in 10 years and bordering on obsolescence.

Would you use Twitter more with 280 characters?</s>Anyone familiar with Twitter likely knows that shorthand is often used to circumvent the current 140-character limit. What you may not know is that Twitter's character limit is more prohibitive to some languages than others.

Twitter has collected and analyzed the average length of tweets in English and Japanese to attempt to show that English messages require a greater number of characters. The short study does not mention whether there are any cultural factors contributing to the results.

With languages using symbolic characters like Chinese and Japanese, it's possible to convey nearly double the amount of information per character versus other languages such as English and Spanish. This means that only half as much information can be crammed into the same size message.

In an attempt to address the shortcoming, Twitter is experimenting with 280-character tweets among a small group of users.

Even though English users may eventually see an extended character limit, Twitter still wants to remain known for posts that "get right to the point with the information of thoughts that matter". As a result, Japanese, Chinese and Korean users may continue to be limited to the current 140-character limit.

On the surface, there are many positive aspects to allowing for more detailed messages to be shared. But, is that necessarily true? Should the microblogging platform extend the character limit to allow for more detailed tweets or is the brevity of Twitter part of its charm?</s>San Francisco-based Twitter is testing a feature enabling users to double the character limit i.e. 280 characters tweets. Under a new test announcement made by Twitter in a blog post, tweet of 280 characters will be rolled out to a small group of users initially for testing before it launches in most countries.

“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 said.

Currently, 140 characters limit tweets can be made by users, however, with this new feature, users can double the amount of characters to tweet, so now it is possible to tweet 280 characters tweets. The 140-character limit was actually based on the limitations of SMS (Short Message Service), but the use of SMS has been obsolete due to the advancement in the smartphone technology.

“We’re hoping fewer Tweets run into the character limit, which should make it easier for everyone to Tweet,” the company wrote.

But, why there’s a need of increasing the character limit? Twitter mentioned the tweet limit was expanded to bring equity to languages that use more space to convey a phrase or a word. According to a research made by Twitter, the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people tweeting in English. Users tweeting in English language frequently hit the 140-character limit while the users tweeting in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean can convey more in fewer characters.

Are you excited about the Twitter’s new character limit? Comment below what you think.</s>NEW YORK (AP) — Need more room to type those deep thoughts? Twitter is testing a 280-character limit for tweets, doubling the current length restriction that’s been in place since the company’s founding 11 years ago.

The test is being made available to a small subset of users and applies to languages other than Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. That’s because in those languages,

Twitter notes, you can convey about double the amount of information in one character as you can in others.

The original 140-character limit was created so tweets would fit in a single text message back when people used Twitter that way. But most people now use Twitter through its mobile app, where there isn’t the same technical constraint.

Twitter has already eased the restrictions, and doesn’t count photos, videos, polls and other things toward the character limit. And users have found creative ways to get around the restrictions, including taking screenshots of blocks of text and highlighting relevant phrases.

San Francisco-based Twitter said in a blog post Tuesday that 9 percent of all tweets in English come up against the 140-character limit, compared with just 0.4 percent of tweets in Japanese.

“Also, in all markets, when people don’t have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people Tweeting — which is awesome!” the blog post reads.

Twitter acknowledged the “emotional attachment” some users might have toward the 140 characters. But it said the new limit, while double the size, is “still brief.”</s>Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey last year made a definitive announcement about the company's famous 140-character count amid rumors that the firm would substantially relax the limit. "It's staying," Dorsey told the "Today" show's Matt Lauer. "It's a good constraint for us."

On Tuesday, the company took it back — for some people, at least.

Starting Tuesday, Twitter said, it's testing a feature to let some users double the amount of characters allowed in a tweet. The 280-character limit will only be available to a small group of people on the site. When asked for more information, Twitter said it would be a "single-digit percentage" of its 328 million users — so, millions — who will be "randomly chosen."

The company declined to comment directly on how it's choosing those people or why it changed its mind about sticking to its 140-character limit. But in a company blog post, product manager Aliza Rosen and senior software engineer Ikuhiro Ihara said the team started looking into the restrictions of the 140-character limit after noticing differences among languages.

Some languages — specifically Chinese, Japanese and Korean — allow for greater expression in fewer characters, Rosen and Ihara said.

"We see that a small percent of tweets sent in Japanese have 140 characters (only 0.4%). But in English, a much higher percentage of tweets have 140 characters (9%). Most Japanese tweets are 15 characters while most English tweets are 34," the post said.

The 280-character test will roll out in all languages except for Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

It's true that some languages allow each character to count for more. My own last name, Tsukayama, is nine letters in English; phonetically in Japanese, it's four letters. If you use Japanese kanji characters, it's three.

But Twitter users in other languages have found workarounds to bypass the 140-character limit. It's common to see someone send out a thread, or "Twitterstorm," by signaling that their thoughts are going to come in several bite-sized chunks — i.e., typing 1/6 to note the first installment of six related tweets. Twitter itself did this Tuesday morning, when addressing why it hasn't suspended President Donald Trump from its platform.

Dorsey himself has used a common workaround — posting an image of longer text — to get around the character limit, even while extolling the virtues of brevity early last year.

It's surprising that Twitter would revisit such an integral part of its network, especially after definitively stating the 140-character limit would remain. And, judging by the post, the company clearly expects some backlash (perhaps after seeing the reaction to the rumors Dorsey felt compelled to address on the "Today" show).

"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," the blog post said. "We understand since many of you have been tweeting for years, there may be an emotional attachment to 140 characters — we felt it, too. But we tried this, saw the power of what it will do, and fell in love with this new, still brief, constraint."

Despite the big announcement, Twitter is being pretty quiet about how this will look to the everyday Twitter user — how likely they are to see the feature on their own accounts, the accounts of others in their timeline, or perhaps in the hands of a certain tweeter-in-chief.

But one thing that's telling: Rosen and Ihara said that "in all markets, when people don't have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people tweeting — which is awesome!"

In other words, Twitter has found that removing this pain point — even if it means giving up something that's been core to its identity — can help it reach more people who will then use its product more. And, ultimately, that's what Twitter has been seeking for years: a way to gain more users and to make its quirky ways easier to understand.

Year by year, the social networking site has made changes to improve its usability, including tweaking the way timelines work, as well as modifying its rules to prevent images, videos and GIFs from counting against the number of characters in a tweet. Not all of those changes have been welcomed by its most devoted users; Twitter has also reversed policy due to user complaints. With this test, Twitter is evolving once more in its pursuit of new users. It's the company's biggest step away from its past yet.</s>Twitter’s 140-character limit could soon be toast.

The company is considering nixing its long-defining constraint in favor a new limit: 280 characters.

The change, which Twitter is currently testing globally with a small group, would apply to tweets in every language except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean — which already allow you to say more with fewer characters.

“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,” Twitter said in a blog post.

The test is sure to provoke a strong reaction among Twitter’s hardcore users, who have a long history of reacting strongly to changes in the service’s fundamentals, such as Twitter’s decision to transform the timeline from reverse chronological order to one that’s algorithmically sorted.

“We understand since many of you have been Tweeting for years, there may be an emotional attachment to 140 characters – we felt it, too. But we tried this, saw the power of what it will do, and fell in love with this new, still brief, constraint,” Twitter said its blog post. “We want to try it out with a small group of people before we make a decision to launch to everyone.”

When Jack Dorsey became Twitter CEO in 2015, he declared a willingness to rethink the entire product to make it more appealing to the masses. "We continue to show a questioning of our fundamentals in order to make the product easier and more accessible to more people," Dorsey said in a July 2015 earnings call. He’s followed through on the promise, adding live video, introducing the algorithmic timeline, changing “faves” to “likes,” creating personalized article recommendations based on Twitter users’ networks, and more. A new character limit would follow the pattern.

Dorsey’s strategy has produced mixed results so far. Since he made the declaration about questioning Twitter’s fundamentals, the company’s stock has lost approximately half its value. But Twitter has added more than 10 million users since then.
Twitter is experimenting with doubling its 140 character limit to 280 characters for all languages except Japanese, Chinese and Korean.