Investors Embrace Twitter's 280-Character Limit, Users Revolt

Investors Embrace Twitter's 280-Character Limit, Users Revolt

On occasion over the years, I have called Twitter's (NYSE: TWTR) 140-character limit "arbitrary," which didn't make me any friends on the service. Debate surrounding this limit has been polarizing and persistent for years. Without fail, shares jump whenever even a rumor emerges that Twitter is considering increasing the 140-character limit, which has the potential to expand the appeal of the platform to mainstream users.

Last night, Twitter officially announced that it was finally experimenting with a 280-character limit, twice the current limit. The company notes that the limit has different implications across different languages, particularly Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, where characters are often entire words. That effectively allows those users to express more with fewer characters, so Twitter says the change is to help level the tweeting field across languages (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean users will not get the longer limit).

Image source: Copyright Aaron Durand (@everydaydude) for Twitter, Inc.

Continue reading

Source: Fool.com