Twitter is testing 280 character Tweets

In life and on the Internet there are few sacred things but, so far, one of them has been the length of the tweets.

When Twitter was founded, the company opted for 140-character messages because it needed full messages to fit into SMS, the preferred way for social network users to receive notifications on their mobile phone just before the apps exploded and data rates.

In this sense, Twitter has detected that there are languages that require more than 140 characters to convey ideas that with other languages are written in a shorter and brief. Japanese, Korean and Chinese have it easier, compared to for example Latin languages like French, Portuguese or Spanish.

The farewell of the 140 characters is thus closer, as the company has announced in its blog and in tweets of its founder and CEO Jack Dorsey that it is testing the 280 characters.

The 280-character length will only be available at this time for a small group of users, but hopefully it will not take long to be available to everyone. The negative may be, as has always been speculated, that this longer length makes reading the timeline more uncomfortable.

We'll see!