China's Twitter will expand text limit to 2,000 characters
Weibo is launching expanded messages as soon as February.
China's version of Twitter, Sina Weibo, also plans to expand its messages' capacity from 140 characters to 2,000. Unlike its American counterpart that's still thinking about it, though, Weibo's already made up its mind. The microblogging service will launch its expanded messages on January 28th to a small group of beta testers. Everyone else -- that is, all 500 million users -- will be able to post long letters/thoughts/diatribes by February 28th.
A Weibo spokesperson told South China Morning Post that only 10 percent of posts on the social network exceed 120 Chinese characters. Not to mention, those posts undergo the same government censorship filter other websites in the region go through -- you can't really post a 2,000-character rant against the government on Weibo. Even so, the company's expanding the text limit anyway "to offer greater choice and a better user experience."
[Image credit: bfishadow/Flickr]
