Ramble on: Twitter doubles character count
Trump and fellow users can go 280 characters
Our commander in chief is going to have a lot more room to tweet.
Twitter announced Tuesday that it rolled out a 280-character limit for single tweets after testing the option among a handful of users since September.
The new character limit applies to languages in which cramming is an issue, such as English. The change won’t apply to Chinese, Japanese or Korean languages because the density of those languages’ writing allows users to say more with fewer characters.
The move will give President Trump, Twitter’s highest-profile user, more room to discuss potential policies and take aim at critics — a habit that has given him a direct megaphone to voters and helped him regularly lay claim to the news cycle but that has dismayed some of his own constituents.
San Francisco-based Twitter says the move is designed to remove the frustration of shoehorning thoughts into 140 characters, a limit that regularly makes for awkward grammar and creative spelling.
When Twitter rolled out the larger character limit, it noticed a drop in the number of tweets running against the maximum count, said Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen.
“We believe people spent less time editing their tweets in the composer,” Rosen said. “This shows that more
space makes it easier for people to fit thoughts in a tweet, so they could say what they want to say and send tweets faster than before.”
Easier for tweeters — but perhaps more onerous for the tweets’ readers. When Twitter revealed it was testing out a larger character limit in September, many users grew concerned their feeds would clog with much longer tweets.
“And in one stroke, Twitter doubles the complexity of our nation’s foreign policy,” late-night host Stephen Colbert joked after Twitter unveiled testing for 280 characters.
Trump continues to use Twitter as his primary platform, a trend he started well before he entered the presidential election. He was not part of the
280-character test.
All may not be lost for those wary of longer political rants and nostalgic for the pithy missives that made the platform beloved by comedians, professional and self-appointed alike.
Rosen said that during the testing period, only 5% of tweets topped the
140-character limit and only 2% went beyond 190 characters.
“We — and many of you — were concerned that timelines may fill up with 280-character tweets, and people with the new limit would always use up the whole space,” Rosen said. “But that didn’t happen.”
Twitter users also expressed concerns the higher count goes against the spirit of the service and its 140character concept, a somewhat arbitrary choice based on the 160 character limit on pre-smartphone SMS textmessaging.
Users already have employed clever tactics to stretch beyond 140 characters, such as screenshots of longer messages or “tweet-storms,” a series of connected tweets.
Ultimately, Twitter hopes its decision could lead to users growing more engaged with the service. Rosen said users with the longer character count earned more likes, retweets and mentions, along with more followers. The change also could lead to user growth.
For its past quarter, Twitter report- ed 330 million monthly active users, up 4% from the same time last year. Frustration with sluggish user growth and sales, particularly in contrast to the rapid expansion of Facebook and Instagram, has battered shares, pressuring CEO Jack Dorsey.
Shares slipped after hours. They closed up 1.4% at $19.66, well off an alltime high of more than $70 but up 20% for the year.