Twitter is doubling in size

6th October

Unless you’ve been living under a social media-sized rock, you’d have heard about Twitter’s plans to double its character limit from 140 to 280 – initially testing the new parameters on a select group of people.

 

While this means we’d no longer have to try and cram our thoughts in one tweet (which is one of the most annoying things ever!), others are outraged, claiming it eliminates brevity – a philosophy which is the life and soul of Twitter.

 

The company’s CEO Jack Dorsey has commented, saying the move allows people to express their thoughts more clearly, but with Twitter currently going thorough a period of slow growth, those in the industry are a little more cynical, mentioning the change could be a ploy to try gain more active users.

 

Dorsey also mentioned that the 140 limit was only ever a technical limitation which coincided with old-school SMS messages, but with hate speeches and trolling rife on Twitter, there’s much more pressing issues the company faces than character limits – I mean, where is that edit button we’re all still crying out for?

 

At TRA, we love Twitter’s 140 character limit, and despite it’s slight annoyances, it’s fun to try and develop a meaningful tweet which both fits and makes sense. However, we’re interested to see how the new character limit will work on a long-term basis, and intrigued to see if it helps to add another dimension to the platform.

 

That being said, we fear the new limit may be too much for Donald Trump. If he can wage war on more than 350 people and organisations* including Snoop Dogg, Meryl Streep, and the entire NFL using just 140 characters, how much damage will he be able to cause using 280?!

 

*A full list of Donald Trump Twitter insults can be found in this handy article pulled together by the NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/01/28/upshot/donald-trump-twitter-insults.html/