7 Questions About Twitter's Doubled Character Limit
On Tuesday evening, Twitter announced that it is experimenting with doubling the length of tweets, allowing users to post up to 280 characters per message.
To start, the feature will only be available to a random set of users on the service. But if adopted by the platform as a whole, the change will constitute one of the most fundamental changes to Twitter’s core product in years.
“This is a small change, but a big move for us,” said Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive officer, in one of the first supersized tweets. “One hundred forty was an arbitrary choice based on the 160-character SMS limit.”
Biz Stone, who cofounded the company and returned to it full-time earlier this year, provided more context in another mega tweet:
Originally, our constraint was 160 (limit of a text) minus username. But we noticed got 1 more than . For fairness, we chose 140. Now texts are unlimited. Also, we realize that 140 isn't fair—there are differences between languages. We're testing the limits. Hello 280!
— Biz Stone (@biz)
