Twitter actually has a pretty good reason for its new character limit

[NelsonG]

People across the world love Twitter. But the Twitter experience isn't quite the same in English, Spanish, Arabic, or Japanese. 

English-speaking Twitter users are used to being able to say a certain amount in a 140-character limit. Since the beginning of Twitter, that 140-character limit has gotten others on Twitter a different amount to say—usually more—depending on the language they're speaking. 

That's one reason Twitter decided to test doubling its character limit from 140 to 280 characters for some users. 

"In languages like Japanese, Korean, and Chinese you can convey about double the amount of information in one character as you can in many other languages, like English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French," Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen and senior software engineer Ikuhiro Ihara wrote in a blog post announcing the test. "We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we're doing something new: we're going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming."  Read more...

More about Twitter, Translation, Languages, 140 Characters, and Business

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