After a research found frustration among users, Twitter decided to expand the character limit of a tweet from 140 to 280 for some users to improve their experience, the company said on Tuesday.
"This is a small change, but a big move for us. 140 was an arbitrary choice based on the 160 character SMS limit," Chief Executive Office Jack Dorsey tweeted, confirming the change to the current restriction that has been in place since the San Francisco-based company was founded in 2006.
According to the company, the update will cover certain languages such as English, Spanish, Portuguese and French. Chinese, Korean and Japanese will not be included, because the company believed that with same characters, those languages can convey more information and emotion than Roman characters do.
Explaining the result of the research carried out by the social network, Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen said they found that only 0.4 percent of tweets sent in Japanese have 140 characters, but it is around 9 percent of tweets in English.
"When people don't have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people tweeting," Rosen said.
The company is testing the new feature with a small group among its 328 million users before deciding whether to launch it to everyone.
"We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter," it said in a blog post.
