简体中文
(THE WALL STREET JOURNAL) For the world’s biggest microblogs, it appears that less is no longer more.
WeiboCorp., China’s homegrown version ofTwitterInc.that is part of Chinese Internet companySinaCorp., said it is planning to ditch its 140-character limit so users can write longer posts,according to China’s Xinhua News. Weibo’s move comes a couple weeks after the revelation thatTwitter intends to get rid of its trademark cap as well.
In a letter to developers that made the rounds on Weibo on Wednesday, the company reportedly said that it will begin testing the new format among VIP users startingJan. 28, according to Xinhua. It will open to the rest of its 200 million users a month later. Weibo CEO Wang Gaofei later posted the letter from his personal account.
Weibo did not immediately respond to request for comment.
While Twitter is contemplating raising the limit to 10,000 characters, Weibo is planning to increase it to 2,000 characters. Like Twitter, it appears Weibo is attempting to preserve the short, conversational nature of the service even while giving users more room to write. According to Xinhua, Mr. Wang said in his post that only the first 140 characters of a message will continue to be shown in users’ feed. If a post goes over that limit, users will have to tap a link to view the rest of it. The Wall Street Journal has previously reported that Twitter is considering a similar plan where users will have to manually expand a tweet to see what comes after the first 140 characters.
When news of Twitter’s plan flooded the social media service earlier this month, CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted a 1,317-character explanation:“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,”Mr. Dorsey wrote. “Instead, what if that text…was actually text? Text that could be searched. Text that could be highlighted. That’s more utility and power.”
There are signs that Twitter users are itching for more characters. Data from 2012 showed that while the average tweet runs about 67.9 characters,there’s a huge spike in the number of tweets that are exactly 140 characters long.
In comparison, a Weibo spokespersontold the South China Morning Postthat, “According to Weibo’s big data, only about 10% of original posts surpass 120 Chinese characters.”
–Yoree Koh
