Twitter confirmed in their official blog, that they are going to expand the character limit of tweets from the usual 140 to 280 characters. This decision of doubling the room for tweets stemmed from the need to be "more expressive," one report said.
A major frustration
The Verge alludes to research done by Twitter. Their report on the news states that on average, only 9 percent of tweets hit the 140-character limit. They concluded that this is "not by accident," and it means people are editing or cutting out parts of their thoughts to fit the limit.
They also addressed the glaring issue that English isn't the only language in the world. While 140 characters may be a reasonable limit for the English language, it may not be the same for Korean, Japanese, or Chinese.
"Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people tweeting in English," Twitter's blog post said. The concerned blog post further added the claim that when people have enough room, people tweet more, which is a good thing for the platform.
Of course, this is easily believable. Ever since Twitter was established, users have devised a lot of ways to virtually surpass the limit (posting an image file containing whole paragraphs comes to mind).
The character limit had always been a frustration — users battled to adapt to it. But now that this big update is rolling out, the whole atmosphere of Twitter is bound to change.
Ranked tweets
Not only does Twitter plan on expanding the character limit, but the same report also said that the platform also plans to do something with the way tweets are served.
Currently, the default setting is that tweets are served in reverse chronological order, with the latest tweets on the top. Unlike Facebook, the Twitter timeline does not account for relevance, personalized or otherwise. It just sorts from the latest tweet and goes backwards from there.
While an option for a relevance-based timeline was introduced in 2016, it was not well-received.
However, it appears that the company did not step away from the idea entirely.
"[The expanded character limit] was being developed simultaneously with a new ranked timeline, which would depart from the purely chronological feed in favor of one that attempted to show users the best tweets first," Casey Newton of The Verge wrote.
It should be noted that both the character limit and the reverse chronological timeline are features that defined Twitter for years. When people talk about tweeting, it's almost second nature to be reminded that tweets are limited to 140 characters. Considering this, this doubling of room and introducing a relevance-based timeline is a massive change for the platform, indeed.
