Weibo Gets Rid of 140 Character Limit Ahead of Twitter
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| Memeburn |
The Chinese social media platform Sina Weibo has often been described as being like a hybrid of Facebook and Twitter. However, it’s always seemed like they’ve wanted to be more like Twitter. particularly with regards to their 140 character limit. Microblogging is a pretty popular idea but now that Twitter are planning on moving away from it, it seems like Weibo are dancing to the same tune.
Since it was been revealed that Twitter want to change the character limit, there have been debates flaring up everywhere, with more people seeming to be against it then there are for. But Sina Weibo must have seen some positive in the change because from the 28th of January ‘Senior Users’ like companies will be able to post up to 2000 characters and a month later on 28th February it will roll out for everyone else. Like Twitter had proposed users can only see the first 140 characters of the post and will have to click a link to read more.
What's kind of strange here is that Twitter are changing it due to the amount of photo posts with longer text but according to Sina Weibo's statistics 10% of original posts on the service only reach 120 characters. So why such a large increase? Now it should be pointed out that it's not as long as the rumoured Twitter increase to 10,000 characters and nowhere near Facebook's character limit but it is a little closer to what it used to be on Facebook. This suggests that maybe they are moving a little closer to Facebook now that Twitter is slowly becoming more unpopular. Yes, they're still copying them to some extent but to lesser extremes and not to mention they’re implementing these changes quicker than Twitter seems to be able to.
The good thing about this change is that people will be able to see some of what Twitter is planning. If it's considered a failure there then Twitter might change their minds about the proposal. So think about this as an early release, keep an eye on Sina Weibo and well, eventually somebody's got to change their mind about the character changes whether they become for or against.
Oh and for those of you that are interested? 2000 characters is a little less than a full A4 page on a word processor, with a standard sized font.
Rosina is a Songbird rookie with a degree in Creative Writing. She's trying to focus on her novel on the side but is hoping that Content Writing will turn out to be a good career choice in the mean time! Follow her @RosinaAtSMF
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Weibo Gets Rid of 140 Character Limit Ahead of Twitter
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Monday, January 25, 2016
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