Twitter to Test Doubling Character Limit for Tweets to 280

Investing.com - Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) said Tuesday that it has started testing 280-character tweets, doubling the previous character limit, in an effort to help users be more expressive. Twitter said the goal was to eliminate constraints that kept people from tweeting more frequently.“When people don’t have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people tweeting,” Twitter said in a blog post.The 140-character limit is a holdover from Twitter's early days when tweets were sent as texts, prior to the development of mobile apps.With 328 million users, Twitter has been criticized by investors for slow user growth which has affected the company’s revenue.The brevity of tweets is a defining characteristic of Twitter, differentiating it from other social media platforms such as Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) and negative reaction has been swift.