Sina Weibo to follow Twitter’s lead and remove 140-character limit

Until recently, Sina Weibo was considered an Asian version of Twitter, but now the Chinese app has the upper hand.

Weibo VIP users will get access to longer messages from January 28, while everyone else will be allowed to share long messages from February 28. Weibo CEO Wang Gaofei reposted the snapshot on his personal account under the user name “Laiquzhijian”.

The site now boasts around 200 million users.

In January first week, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey reignited debate over bidding adieu to 140-character limit. As speculations on larger tweets have been making rounds for some time on social media, Weibo’s leaders made a decision to be the first to make the move and beat Twitter to the punch. It said that during the initial phase, the new format is expected to be tested among “senior users” from Jan 28th and open to all users by Feb 28th.

Sina Weibo is a social network that emulates Facebook to some extent, and Twitter to a bigger level, and is on the peak of popularity in China.

According to reports on Sina, Wang said only 140 characters will be displayed in feeds and a link will appear to show the entire content if a post exceeds the character limit during the trial run. The company changed the rules for private messages in July 2015, allowing users to write 10,000 characters. 140 characters of each post will be available for viewing upfront.