Twitter increases its character limit count to 280
One of the widely used platforms for social media is Twitter. It has now expanded its character count to 280 rolling out a couple of days back. The idea is to allow the users to express their thoughts without the limitation of words. Initially this was tested by giving access to a limited set of user to understand the constraint of characters impacts them. Twitter claimed that people tweeting in languages like Japanese, Korean and Chinese were able to convey double the information in a single character.Aas compared to the ones using English, Spanish, Portuguese or French. This being the reason they decided that upon this expansion.
Controversy #280
After the announcement many argued that this increase will make the tweet less readable. And that twitters is focusing on a featured which wasn’t required. Which is in turn diverting the attention from more critical issues like harassment and bullying.
People also have a view that extending words will not have much impact on the information. It’s just that people will use more words to express the same thoughts. Recently a tweet by CEO Jack Dorsey’s about 280-character tweet vent viral. In which people have made a redline cancellation on words. To demonstrated how it was possible to shrink the word countdown of the tweet without losing its meaning.
On the other hand there are some people who are pleading this change since September. However in a poll which asked for the extension, a large number of Americans were in favor of it than opposition.
However majority of the response is negative. Twitter has also come up with the data 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. Also it was 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. They have also noted that only 1 percent of tweets hit the character limit after the expansion to 280 characters.
Though it’s just a few days, with time we will get more insights on the same.
