Twitter has announced that is has started tests which could spell the end of the traditional 140 character limit.
As with most new feature trials, the extended tweets will only be offered to a select number of users, but will cover various European languages including English, German and Spanish. Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen explained in a blog post written this morning that European languages are affected the most by the 140 character limit, much more than the Asian double-byte character set.
This significant change may be down to Twitter's ongoing pursuit of younger users and new features that will attract advertisers.
“We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we’re going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming – this means Japanese, Chinese, and Korean will continue to have 140 characters to tweet," the blog post stated.
“We’ve learned from research that 140 characters feels more constraining in parts of the world due to differing language density. The goal is to reduce the friction involved with tweeting for some, while ensuring Twitter is still about brevity.”
