@Twitter now supports 280 characters, so we can be verbose. With such limits, one could almost write an essay. Still, I would prefer that they show actual characters left than display a usage dial. It doesn’t warn you about limits until you get within 20 characters. #innovation?
— Michael Levy (@Michael_R_Levy) November 8, 2017
Twitter had doubled its capacity to 280 character tweets noting that in countries where there is less character cramming (e.g., China, Japan, Korea), there are fewer full-length messages and a higher propensity to tweet. “Twitter is about brevity,” blogged Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen and senior software engineer, Ikuhiro Ihara. “It’s what makes it such a great way to see what’s happening. Tweets get right to the point with the information or thoughts that matter. That is something we will never change.”
“Historically, 9% of Tweets in English hit the character limit. This reflects the challenge of fitting a thought into a Tweet, often resulting in lots of time spent editing and even at times abandoning Tweets before sending. With the expanded character count, this problem was massively reduced – that number dropped to only 1% of Tweets running up against the limit.
- Aliza Rosen, Twitter Product Manager
Twitter noted that during a test, the length of tweets quickly returned to its terse style, but with few tweeters bumping up against the limit. “We saw when people needed to use more than 140 characters, they Tweeted more easily and more often. But importantly, people Tweeted below 140 most of the time and the brevity of Twitter remained,” said Rosen.
So, I guess we’ll all be fine, but what does this mean for the Tweeter-in-Chief and posterity? Will some future historian performing data analytics pick up on the change in length?
Will Trumpish remain its own special language? Will Sad! become So Sad! And was cofeveve an acronym he can now spell out for us?