![Twitter says it is testing a plan to expand tweets to up to 280 characters, double the existing limit](https://static.pulse.ng/img/world/origs7380111/2756364285-w644-h960/0f0dd149b31d9f1de583f28e2c7cd9cf1c915460.jpg)
San Francisco-based Twitter said Tuesday
that the new limit, a major shift for the messaging platform known for
its 140-character tweets, aims to address "a major cause of frustration"
for many users.
Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey fired off what may be one of the first expanded tweets.
"This is a small change, but a big move for us," he wrote, calling the previous limit was an "arbitrary choice.
"Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet," Dorsey added.
A
"small group" of users will see the new limits before Twitter decides
on rolling out the changes more broadly, the company said.
"Trying
to cram your thoughts into a tweet -- we've all been there, and it's a
pain," product manager Aliza Rosen and software engineer Ikuhiro Ihara
said in a blog post.
"We're doing something new: we're going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming."
Twitter
planned to leave the old limit in place for tweets in Japanese, Chinese
and Korean because internal data showed written characters in those
languages packed plenty into the allotted space.
"Our
research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of
frustration for people tweeting in English, but it is not for those
tweeting in Japanese," Rosen and Ihara said.
"Also,
in all markets, when people don't have to cram their thoughts into 140
characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people
tweeting."
Twitter,
which became a public company in 2013, has never reported a profit,
even though it has built a loyal base of celebrities, journalists and
political figures, including prolific tweeter US President Donald Trump.
In
its most recent quarter, Twitter reported its base of monthly active
users was unchanged at 328 million compared to the first three months of
the year and up just five percent from a year earlier.
Its
growth has failed to keep pace with social network leader Facebook,
which has some two billion users, and Facebook-owned Instagram, with 800
million.
'Making it easier'
"We're
hoping fewer tweets run into the character limit, which should make it
easier for everyone to tweet," Rosen and Ihara said in the blog post.
"We
understand since many of you have been tweeting for years, there may be
an emotional attachment to 140 characters... But we tried this, saw the
power of what it will do, and fell in love with this new, still brief,
constraint."
Twitter
has been seeking to draw in users by offering more video, including
live streaming of sporting events, aiming to broaden its appeal.
"More is better; no doubt," Gartner analyst Brian Blau said of expanding room in tweets.
"It is still not a lot of content, but you can put a lot in there."
Reaction
on Twitter was mixed, with some lobbying for the original cap and the
pressure it applied to succinctly express thoughts.
"The
280-character limit is a terrible idea," New York Times television
critic James Poniewozik said in a Twitter post retweeted 12,000 times
and liked 30,000 times in a matter of hours.
"The whole beauty of Twitter is that it forces you to express your ideas concisely."
Analyst
Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research fired off a tweet saying: "Worried that
we'll lose the inherent glanceability of the vast majority of
140-character tweets. More importantly, not the fix Twitter needs."
Many
others on Twitter welcomed the news and said raising the character cap
was long overdue. Some people already resort to long strings of
rapid-fire tweets, known as "Twitter storms," to string together lengthy
comment.
Looking like Facebook?
The
messaging platform reported a net loss of $116 million in the second
quarter, slightly wider than its $107 million loss a year ago.
It
remained an open question whether the new tweet limit would ignite the
growth an engagement Twitter needs to compete in the fast-moving social
media segment.
"The more they expand, the more they start looking like Facebook," Enderle Group analyst Rob Enderle said of Twitter.
"And if they start looking like Facebook, then Facebook will take them out and has the war chest for it."
The
move by Twitter could also be rendered moot by lifestyle changes
brought about by trends in voice-commanded digital assistants and
looking at the world through mixed-reality glasses, according to Gartner
analyst Blau.
"What are tweets in those
worlds?" Blau said. "We see Twitter sort of struggling to get this
business right while everyone else is moving in a another direction."
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