Twitter Characters: Extending from 140 to 280?

Twitter Characters: Do we need more?

So Twitter, the social media platform that we all love, is potentially changing. Could it be the death of Twitter as we know it? To try and breathe new air into the platform, Twitter are trialling extending it’s Twitter characters from 140 to 280 characters, the reasoning behind this is pretty sound.

Twitter feel as though everyone should be able to express themselves easily, which is fair enough and through testing Twitter have found that tweets in Japanese are easier to tweet as the Japanese language can convey more in less characters, below are some images from Twitter which highlight the same tweet in several different languages and their different character lengths.

As you can see in Japanese it is half the character length than that of Spanish and English. To combat this, Twitter are trialling 280 characters for a small select group of people. Simply Twitter searching “280” brings up a whole heap of opinions, some of them positive, some of them negative and some of them funny (as you would expect from Twitter)

What was the most appealing to us at the office and we’re sure around the world as to why Twitter was so great as you had to be intelligent and concise with your Tweets, you had to try and cram in everything you wanted to say in a witty Tweet. With 280 words that romanticism is gone and you can Tweet to your hearts content. But as one Twitter user pointed out, it can also help A LOT of people:

 

If anyone was wondering what 280 characters in a Tweet would look like:

Question: Would 280 characters in a tweet work? Will it breathe new life into Twitter, or will it kill it? Let us know by sending us a tweet: @howtokillanhour