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Twitter Officially Expands Its Character Count To 280 Starting Today (techcrunch.com)

Twitter is rolling out an update around the world to allow users to post 280-character tweets. The company first announced the controversial plan to move beyond its traditional 140 characters back in September, noting at the time how a longer character count allowed users to express more of their thoughts without running out of room to tweet. TechCrunch reports: At the time of its original announcement, the company cited data backing up its decision that referenced how the character constraints impacted users differently, depending on their language. Twitter said that those who tweeted in languages like Japanese, Korean and Chinese were able to express around double the amount of information in a single character, compared with users who spoke English, Spanish, Portuguese or French, for example. In today's blog post about the public launch of 280 characters, Twitter aims to assuage people's fears that their timelines will fill with expanded tweets. The company said that during the trial period, people continued to tweet below 140 characters most of the time -- after the novelty of being able to use more characters wore off. Specifically, Twitter found that only 5 percent of tweets were sent out with more than 140 characters and of those, only 2 percent were over 190 characters.

14 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. Which means that... by kurkosdr · · Score: 2

    US citizens will get longer presidential addresses from today.

  2. Won't matter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Trump doesn't have the attention span to type that many characters.

    covfefe!!!!

    1. Re:Won't matter by boudie2 · · Score: 3, Funny

      Calm down! It's only for 7 more years.

    2. Re:Won't matter by Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Funny

      ... under the current constitution.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    3. Re:Won't matter by boudie2 · · Score: 2

      We'll see.

  3. Re:cue the Trump tweet conversation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Say what you want, but it was under Trump that Saudi Arabia allowed women to drive cars and arrested ISIS-funding billionaires and princes. Totally co-incidentally and most likely unrelated to funding terrorists, these same guys have also funded the Clinton Foundation.

    On the negative side, my stocks are up only up 23% this year. I thought Trump promised 50%. And the fucking wall? The prototypes are epic and all, but there's about 100 feet of the actual wall that was built to date, not 1000 miles.

  4. 280 limit? why not 640? by thereitis · · Score: 4, Funny

    Skip the middle increments and go straight to 640 characters.

  5. xkcd my arse by Hognoxious · · Score: 2

    Is that you, Gabe?

    2008? Really?

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    1. Re:xkcd my arse by sexconker · · Score: 2

      Something about Hognoxious, Poperazo, and MightyMartian.

      I'm sure an AC will come along and explain it to me.

  6. Time for the apps to catch up. by HermMunster · · Score: 2

    Most apps are programmed for the 140 characters. I'm pretty sure most people, for the time being, will be tweeting at the 140 characters.

    --
    You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
  7. In other news, equally important by rossz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've lost my toenail clippers.

    --
    -- Will program for bandwidth
  8. You fools! by dywolf · · Score: 2

    You were so preoccupied with whether or not you could that they didn't stop to think if you should.

    --
    The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
  9. Re:Nobody will ever need 640 characters by squiggleslash · · Score: 2

    SMS has nothing to do with submarines. 160 characters was used because SMS was originally a GSM feature, that used the fixed size control channel messages to transmit text. 160 was what was left when you excluded headers/etc. It's 140 for Twitter instead of 160 because Twitter reserved 20 to identify the person tweeting.

    --
    You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  10. Re:feeds fill up by Wulf2k · · Score: 2

    What if it's a picture of 281 characters?