Hyderabad: A year after increasing the length of tweets from 140 to 280 characters, Twitter said that there has been an increase in the usage of phrases like ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ While the use of ‘please’ was up by 54 per cent, that of ‘thank you’ had increased by 22 per cent.
Twitterati is using complete words instead of abbreviations like ‘u r,’ ‘b4’, after they were allowed more characters. The use of abbreviations like ‘gr8’ was down by 36 per cent, ‘b4’13 per cent, and ‘sry’ by 5 per cent.
Likewise, there was an increase in usage of words like ‘great’ by 32 per cent, ‘before’ by 70 per cent and ‘sorry’ by 31 per cent. The number of tweets with a question mark had increased by 30 per cent. It may be mentioned here that the 140 characters was tied to SMS length of 160 minus the user’s name length.
Even though the character limit has been expanded, brevity is preferred by people. Only 1 per cent of tweets were hitting the 280-character limit with only 12 per cent tweets being longer than 140 characters.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, sharing the details, noted, “Also, people are asking more questions and having more conversations. All this, and yet the majority of tweets are still under 140.”
