Twitter trials new 280-character limit to help cramming

In a bid to give its users more characters to express themselves, Twitter has announced plans to increase its iconic 140 character limit to 280.

According to Twitter, one of the reasons for this is because of languages impacted by cramming.

Just 0.4% of tweets sent in Japanese have 140 characters, which is a “considerable difference to a 9% of English tweets having 140 characters”, the company said.

This is due to languages like Japanese and Chinese being able to convey more in one character, it added.

Twitter is already trying out this feature with a small group right.

Earlier this year, the social media site made all the 140 characters available to users replying to tweets. It also removed character limits from Direct Messages sent privately between users and stopped counting images and other media attached to tweets as part of the character limit in an attempt to improve the service.