Looking for tweets with a little more substance? You might soon be in luck… at least, length-wise.
Twitter is allowing a select group of users to experience tweeting at twice the size. Rather than the traditional 140-character limit, some users will get up to 280 characters to express themselves.
“We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we’re doing something new,” Product Manager Aliza Rosen and Senior Software Engineer Ikuhiro Ihara wrote in an official blog post.
“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,” they added.
New Limit Doesn’t Affect Certain Languages
Due to the inherent brevity of the characters in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, all three languages remain exempt from the new limit.
And though the extra characters are only available to an exclusive group, it may not stay that way for long.
“We tried this, saw the power of what it will do, and fell in love with this new, still brief, constraint,” wrote Rosen and Ihara.
“We understand since many of you have been Tweeting for years, there may be an emotional attachment to 140 characters – we felt it, too,” they wrote. “We are excited to share this today, and we will keep you posted about what we see and what comes next.”
