Twitter"s 140 character limit has been a cause for frustration for users of the service for quite some time now. Now, the social media service is trying out a change that will slightly alleviate the pain of cramming your content into the allowed limit without losing coherence. Twitter is testing out an extension of the limit to 280 characters for all languages except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.
The company"s research showed that in languages such as English, Spanish, and Portuguese, users would have to remove words that convey an important message or emotion. This was not a problem with other languages like Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. In fact, almost 9% of all English tweets use up all their quota of characters while only 0.4% of Japanese users ever need to reach the limit.
The company made the announcement over a tweet:
The company has recognized that people might feel nostalgic about 140 characters but, also emphasized the "power" that this move will bring about. As of now, this new "functionality" is available to a small group of users with the company keen to assess feedback before making a decision to make it available for all users.
Now, for that edit button.
Source: Twitter