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The 140-character limit nobody lifted
A project called Beyond 140 was everywhere. The data pointed one way: people in Japan tweeted six times more often than people in Western markets, because kanji packs far more into the same number of characters than a Romance language does.
The end state was obvious, but it needed real work and real trade-offs, and no one wanted to make the call. So the company ran yet another design sprint and yet another cycle. The limit finally lifted close to two years after Tom Verrilli, who worked on growth there, had left.
Nine heads of product came through in the two years he was at Twitter. When the limit did go, nobody died and the place did not fall apart. Editing tweets took another two and a half years.
Why does kanji fit more into 140 characters?
Each kanji usually stands for a whole word or meaningful unit, while a Romance language spells the same idea out in several letters. A Japanese sentence therefore tends to take far fewer characters than its English translation. In Twitter's 2017 analysis of its 280-character test, the average Japanese tweet ran about 15 characters, against about 34 for English.
Why was the limit 140 in the first place?
Twitter launched in 2006 built around SMS text messages, which were capped at 160 characters. The company set aside 20 of those characters for the username, which left 140 for the message. The 160-character SMS cap itself goes back to 1985, when the German engineer Friedhelm Hillebrand counted the length of typical postcards and telexes and settled on that number.
How did longer tweets change what people wrote?
Twitter began testing a 280-character limit in 2017 and rolled it out to most languages that year, leaving out Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. The company reported that before the test about 9 percent of English tweets ran into the 140 limit. After people could write more, only about 1 percent hit the new cap. Most tweets stayed short, and the company said only a small share went past 140 characters at all.
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