Chinese social network Sina Weibo, often called the country’s version of Twitter, is ending its 140-character limit for user posts. The move could increase pressure on Twitter to do likewise, following reports it will get rid of its iconic 140 character limit for tweets. Sina Weibo CEO Wang Gaofei re-posted a letter to developer’s from […]
Chinese social network Sina Weibo, often called the country’s version of Twitter, is ending its 140-character limit for user posts.
The move could increase pressure on Twitter to do likewise, following reports it will get rid of its iconic 140 character limit for tweets.
Sina Weibo CEO Wang Gaofei re-posted a letter to developer’s from Weibo that explained “senior users” would be able to use more than 140 characters from January 28, with the feature open to all users by February 28.
First reported by the Xinhua news agency, in his re-post, Gaofei said that during the initial trial period the first 140 characters will be displayed as normal, with a link to the full post also appearing, should the message go beyond the limit.
The site currently boasts around 200 million users.
There are widespread rumours that Twitter is also planning to ditch the limit, possibly upping it to 10,000 characters, as its latest attempts to revive fortunes. Stock prices have plummeted and the site suffered a massive outage on Tuesday when many users were unable to access the site for up to six hours.
Twitter recently indicated it was reconsidering its own character limit.
“We didn’t start Twitter with a 140-character restriction,” chief executive Jack Dorsey wrote earlier this month. “We added that early on to fit into a single SMS message. It’s become a beautiful constraint… [but] we’ve spent a lot of time observing what people are doing on Twitter, and we see them taking screenshots of text and tweeting it. What if that… was actually text? Text that could be searched, text that could be highlighted – that’s more utility and power.”
