People Who Got Twitter's 280-Character Limit Are Going A Bit Nuts
Brevity will no longer be the soul of wit, if Twitter sees through its plan to increase its legendary 140-character limit. Yesterday, the micro-blogging site doubled the limit to 280 characters for a some select users around the world to test the success of the move. In a blogpost explaining this strategic shift, Twitter's product manager, Aliza Rosen, and senior software engineer, Ikuhiro Ihara, wrote, "Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people Tweeting in English, but it is not for those Tweeting in Japanese. Also, in all markets, when people don't have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people Tweeting – which is awesome!"
Not surprisingly, Twitter users across the world had much to say about Twitter's bold decision, with an equal amount of cheering on and backlash. But regardless of whether they approved of the 280-character limit or hated the thought of losing the very essence of what made Twitter, Twitter, the few that were chosen to be a part of the test roll-out went little nuts using the feature.
Ever since the announcement yesterday, the test group users have been using the increased character limit to say all kinds of hilarious, nonsensical, musical, and even activistic things.
As a regular tweeter, sometimes I feel irritated with their character limit. I spent lot of time tweaking the sentence, removing spaces, removing tags, shortening words and all that crap is absolutely unnecessary for someone who just want to share something. More space is just more freedom to express and I welcome this move.