Weibo Beats Twitter in Removing140-Character Limit
China’s very own social media network, Sina Weibo, which can be at best described as a cross between Twitter, and Facebook, today revealed its plans to remove the 140-character limit that it has had from the time of its inception.
According to a report from Xinhua, a Chinese news agency of repute, the company’s CEO confirmed the plans for this change, told the agency what will follow. The new format will see Weibo allowing posts up to 2,000 characters in length. This new feature will initially roll out to “senior users” on January 28th, and will be live on all other accounts in exactly a month’s time.
In a letter to developers sent from the desk of Weibo’s CEO, Wang Gaofei, the social networking company explained how exactly the change be like. Wang informed that users will still only see 140 characters per message in their feeds, but in added functionality, they’ll also be able to click a link to the whole post if it exceeds the 140 character limit.
Funny enough, this change comes amid rumours that Twitter has future plans to drop the character limit on its own platform. The company has already dropped the limit for direct messages but it’s still not clear as to how it will implement taking this cap off tweets.
The last fiscal year saw Twitter face increasing pressure from investors because of its falling share prices. The company is said to be in dire need for new users, and as such, this step from Weibo of removing the cap on character limit could well push Twitter into serious contemplation mode over its strategy going ahead.
