Social Sphere

November 7 marked a major turning point for Twitter, which upped its long-standing 140 character-limit to 280 characters. The site had begun testing out 280-character tweets on September 26 with a limited number of accounts prior to making the update available to all users. Instead of the good old character count, tweets in the making now come with a little circle in the bottom right corner to visually indicate how much space has been used as opposed to how much is left. The move comes in the wake of Twitter’s interest in retaining new users and allowing people to express themselves more easily. And while many users readily welcomed the upgrade, some of them expressed mixed reactions towards its impact given Twitter’s inherent composition as a brevity-driven platform.