Sept. 27 (UPI) — Twitter on Tuesday announced it is experimenting with character limits twice as long as those currently in place.
The move would mark a departure in the microblogging social media platform’s setup. Twitter has had a 140-character limit for its posts since it went live in 2006.
In announcing the decision in a company blog post, product manager Aliza Rosen and senior software engineer Ikuhiro Ihara wrote that Twitter is trying out 280-character limits on a small group of users who tweet in languages not including Japanese, Chinese and Korean.
The employees wrote that because of alphabet differences, 9 percent of tweets in English hit the 140-character limit. That rate is 0.4 percent for Japanese tweets.
“Twitter is about brevity. It’s what makes it such a great way to see what’s happening,” they wrote. “Tweets get right to the point with the information or thoughts that matter. That is something we will never change.
Ihara and Rosen wrote that Twitter will collect data from the test group and gather feedback before making any decision to make the change across almost all users.
