More room for greater depth and detail: implications for academic research of Twitter's expanded character limit

Twitter makes its data available in real-time and at no cost, making it a popular data source for many academic researchers. Wasim Ahmed discusses some of the implications of the decision to expand the character limit from 140 to 280. Greater space makes for greater depth and detail, addressing the difficulties of interpretation that 140-character tweets would sometimes present. However, some data retrieval tools have been slow to catch up, and the change may also make historical comparisons problematic. Overall, the character increase is of value to researchers and should inspire further innovative and exciting research.