Weibo to copy Twitter, abolish 140-character limit

Both Twitter and China’s Weibo will soon involve more reading. Photo credit: B Rosen.

Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter, indicated today that it will soon remove its 140-character limit. The move comes two weeks after reports emerged of Twitter testing out 10,000-character tweets.

Weibo CEO Wang Gaofei said this morning that paid-up Weibo members will get a 2,000-character limit starting January 28. It will be rolled out to everyone on February 28, writes the Sina Tech site. Sina is Weibo’s parent company.

Twitter’s Jack Dorsey declined to say when 10,000-character tweets will roll out.

When a Weibo users posts a long missive, the first 140 characters will be displayed and then some kind of “show more” button will allow people to read on if they wish.

Alibaba-backed Weibo, which has 222 million monthly active users (MAUs), has seen slow growth since people started taking much of their social media life onto WeChat, a messaging app made by Alibaba arch-rival Tencent. WeChat has 650 million MAUs.

While Weibo has often been way ahead in launching features before Twitter (like background images, supporting GIFs and video playback), on this occasion it appears to be reacting to an idea that Twitter is working on. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey declined to say when 10,000-character tweets will roll out when he confirmed the move one day after media reports broke the news.

pic.twitter.com/bc5RwqPcAX

— Jack (@jack) January 5, 2016

Source: Sina Tech