Twitter Inc. announced today a giant step toward allowing people to better express themselves: It’s doubling the character limit on tweets from 140 to 280 characters.

The new limit will be tested on only a select audience at the moment, but Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen explained that Twitter hopes to find a suitable character limit to suit all languages. In a blog post, Aliza Rosen explained what to most people might seem quite obvious: that when given a limit of 140 characters, it just isn’t enough to explain a sentiment at times or describe a situation.

What’s more interesting is when working with her Japanese colleague, Senior Software Engineer Ikuhiro Ihara, she found that this is seldom the case for him when tweeting in Japanese.

“He finishes sharing his thought and still has room to spare,” wrote Rosen. “This is because in languages like Japanese, Korean, and Chinese you can convey about double the amount of information in one character as you can in many other languages, like English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French.”

This is a small change, but a big move for us. 140 was an arbitrary choice based on the 160 character SMS limit. Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence! https://t.co/TuHj51MsTu

— jack (@jack) September 26, 2017

After conducting some research on which languages are prone to “cramming” comments, they found that most English tweets contain an average of 34 characters, while in Japanese the average is just 15 characters. At the same time 9 percent of tweets in English hit the character limit, while in Japanese, only 0.4 percent hit the limit.

Rosen wrote that this is a major cause of frustration for English-language posters, but added that data shows that it also results in fewer tweets in the languages that cram the words.

One might ask if the short character limit was always the point of Twitter, to which Rosen explained: “Twitter is about brevity…. Tweets get right to the point with the information or thoughts that matter. That is something we will never change.”

No sooner did Twitter announce the change that some media asked what Twitter aficionado President Donald Trump might do with twice the space to vent his sometimes unrestrained opinions. Twitter did not divulge what group, or how many of its 328 million users, would be part of the trial.

Close your eyes.

Imagine Trump using Twitter.

Now imagine Trump using Twitter with 280 characters.

Now close Twitter.

— M.G. Siegler (@mgsiegler) September 26, 2017

Image: geralt/Pixabay