One of Twitter's unique features is its 140-character limit. When the site was first picking up speed all those years ago, it was sold to tech-heads as a "micro-blogging" platform.
But now Twitter is upping its game. At least, its character limit game. Certain users can now blow up your timeline with massive, 280-character tweets. It all has to do with Twitter wanting people to Tweet more.
In languages like Japanese, more complex thoughts and Tweets can be made without bumping up against the limit. In fact, according to Twitter, only 0.4% of Japanese Twitter users go over the limit composing their tweets. Compare that to the 9% of English speakers who run afoul of the limit.
Twitter says "when people don’t have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters" across all its markets, they tend to use the platform more. Tweets in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean "convey about double the amount of information" of languages like English, Spanish, Portuguese or French. Hence the move to double the character limit.
The 280-character limit is currently only available "to a small group," with no mention in the announcement of when it plans to roll it out to the remaining Twitter users.
Twitter is good for lots of things, like truly bizarre comedy, complaining endlessly, or things like early impressions of Blade Runner 2049, for example. It will be interesting to see what effect the extra limit will have on users.
Seth Macy is IGN's weekend web producer and just wants to be your friend. Follow his award-winning Twitter account @sethmacy.
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