As Twitter ponders removing the 140-character limit, its Chinese equivalent has done just that

10 months ago

Chinese social media Sina Weibo, the country’s version of Twitter, has confirmed it will remove its 140-character limit at the end of the month.

The Chinese site’s CEO Wang Gaofei re-posted a letter to developer’s from Weibo that explained “senior users” would be able to use more than 140 characters from January 28, with the feature open to all users by February 28.

First reported by the Xinhua news agency, in his re-post, Gaofei said that during the initial trial period the first 140 characters will be displayed as normal, with a link to the full post also appearing, should the message go beyond the limit.

The site currently boasts around 200 million users.

There are widespread rumours that Twitter is also planning to ditch the limit, possibly upping it to 10,000 characters, as its latest attempts to revive fortunes. Stock prices have plummeted and the site suffered a massive outage on Tuesday when many users were unable to access the site for up to six hours.

Twitter is yet to comment officially on the rumours, but has shown in the past it’s not against altering the functionality of the site – last year, the “favourite” button was replaced with a “like” icon similar to on social networking rival Facebook.