Enlarge / Jack Dorsey, co-founder and chief executive officer of Twitter. (credit: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg)
The 140-character limit is Twitter’s defining feature and also its most controversial. Critics say that it makes the service confining and unfriendly to new users. Defenders say that enforced brevity is what makes the service so useful.
Twitter is considering doubling the limit. In a Tuesday blog post, Twitter announced that a limited number of users will be given the ability to use up to 280 characters in a tweet.
It might seem like expanding the limit will only cause people to pack more information in to each tweet. But Twitter argues that’s not actually the case. They point to the experience of Japanese, where a richer character set means that you can say more with fewer characters. Japanese users are subject to the same 140-character limit English users are, but they find the limit much less constraining:
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