News Comment #6

Interesting technology news this week as Slate reports that Twitter is testing out a new, longer character limit. If this test works out they plan on giving a 240-character limit to their users except for those in China, Japan, and Korea. I actually looked for someone to be talking about this specifically because I had been seeing freakishly long tweets this week and was wondering what that was all about. I am excited about this news. I’m not a grammar nazi per say but as a former yearbook editor I don’t enjoy the way Twitter makes me use language that was very obviously wrong.

The story reports that this change is meant to help people in countries that use more characters in their language express themselves more fully. The reason it isn’t being rolled out in China, Japan, and Korea is because their language uses fewer characters to express the same thing.

As the story points out there is sure to be backlash over this change. People don’t like changes on social media. I remember just recently when Facebook changed to circular profile pictures everyone I knew freaked out because it was odd and different and now the banners don’t work well! I am interested to see if this change gets rolled out to everyone. I really want to have 240 characters in the future!

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2017/09/twitter_may_double_its_character_limit_freak_out_or_nah.html



1 Comment so far

  1.   fuglsang on October 2nd, 2017

    140 characters doesn’t force you to be wrong. It forces you to be concise. 280 characters is a waste. The “magic” of Twitter, if it ever existed, will be lost. Long live brevity!

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