Twitter expands 140-character limit to 280 for English, Hindi and five other Indian languages

After weeks of beta testing, social media mogul Twitter has rolled out a new update to its micro blogging platform that doubling the current character limit from 140 to 280.

This is the second big move in two years from Twitter; last year, it had relaxed 140-character limit by allowing users to embed hypertext links (and pictures) without worrying of cutting short the tweet.

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With the extended 280 characters limit, Twitterati will be able to express their thought more articulate than before. However, some are not that excited with the Twitter's recent move. They claim Twitter's 140 character limit was more than enough to convey one's opinion and makes up a short and sweet message.

What compelled Twitter to expand character limit to 280?

Well, Twitter had actually received requests from many users, particularly English speaking folks, who thought 140 characters limit was too less to express articulate opinion and often resorting to short forms of words, which sometimes loses meaning (grammatically speaking).

"In September, we launched a test that expanded the 140 character limit so every person around the world could express themselves easily in a Tweet. Our goal was to make this possible while ensuring we keep the speed and brevity that makes Twitter, Twitter. Looking at all the data, we're excited to share we've achieved this goal and are rolling the change out to all languages where cramming was an issue," Aliza Rosen, product manager, Twitter, said in a statement.

As per the internal survey, Twitter found that more than nine percent of English tweets reach the 140 character limit, while the Chinese, Japanese and Korean tweets, most of the time never hit the maximum limit.

For instance, Japanese use just 15 characters on an average to express their feelings on Twitter, as they can convey double the amount of information in one character compared to other languages such as English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French.

Going forward, Japanese, Korean and Chinese will continue to have 140 character limit, while English Twitterati will have the luxury to use 280 characters.

In India, Twitter has confirmed to have increased the character limit to 280 for six languages--Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi and Tamil.

However, several social media users are not happy with the Twitter's move.

Here's what they had to say on Twitter's new 280-character limit policy:

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