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Twitter Tests Doubling Character Limit For Tweets To 280 (theverge.com)
Twitter announced today that it has started testing 280-character tweets for select users. The new limit doubles the current 140-character limit, and is said to help users be more expressive. The Verge reports: "Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people tweeting in English," the company said in a blog post. "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!"
About 9 percent of all tweets today are exactly 140 characters, Twitter says. It's tough to do that on accident, suggesting that users frequently have to edit their initial thoughts to get them under the limit. (It's certainly true for me.) Now Twitter hopes to ease that burden by doubling the character limit in what it calls "languages impacted by cramming," which includes every language except for Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. The report goes on to note that the "140-character limit was originally established to reflect the length of SMS messages, which was how tweets were distributed prior to the development of mobile apps. SMS messages are limited to 160 characters; Twitter reserved the remaining 20 for the username," reports The Verge.
About 9 percent of all tweets today are exactly 140 characters, Twitter says. It's tough to do that on accident, suggesting that users frequently have to edit their initial thoughts to get them under the limit. (It's certainly true for me.) Now Twitter hopes to ease that burden by doubling the character limit in what it calls "languages impacted by cramming," which includes every language except for Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. The report goes on to note that the "140-character limit was originally established to reflect the length of SMS messages, which was how tweets were distributed prior to the development of mobile apps. SMS messages are limited to 160 characters; Twitter reserved the remaining 20 for the username," reports The Verge.
you know whats actually amazing?
they created a system, with a limit of 140 characters, got huge numbers of users but running their system was still more expensive than what they could profit from the users - this despite the complexity of the system being simple as can get compared to contemporary facebook.
oh and if you're outside of usa and are wondering why the 140 character limit in the first place? well, twitter was originally like a one-liner webpage plugin, which was coded terribly but had a good amount of highly visible seed bloggers to start using it - but the limit came from that you could order tweets to your phone delivered via sms.
which was possible because USA had/has a system where you pay for received SMS so sending them was free for twitter - in most of the world sender pays for spam and receiving sms messages had always been free. this was in a timeframe where you could actually get instant messaging for few bucks a month already if you were living in europe(through gprs) too.
I say it was coded like shit because otherwise they would have been in profit from year 2 from all the webtraffic(and ads made possible by said webtraffic). also them spending money on useless marketing people and useless executives has had an effect on their poor profits vs. spent money. now the reason why it's all so ridiculous is that they had a fixed size limit on messages which was tiny - the server costs should have been miniscule but they weren't.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.