Twitter today announced that the 280 character limit for tweets that it introduced back in September is being rolled out to all Twitter users. The new 280 character limit, which doubles the existing 140-character limit, is available for all users and is being implemented for all languages where "cramming" was a problem.
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In September, we launched a test that expanded the 140 character limit so every person around the world could express themselves easily in a Tweet. Our goal was to make this possible while ensuring we keep the speed and brevity that makes Twitter, Twitter. Looking at all the data, we're excited to share we've achieved this goal and are rolling the change out to all languages where cramming was an issue.
Twitter said that it noticed people who were using Twitter in English would hit the character limit more often than tweets in languages like Chinese and Japanese, which is why the company ultimately decided to raise the character limit. The changes are rolling out to all languages except for Japanese, Korean, and Chinese.
According to Twitter's analytics, most people with access to the 280 character limit continued to share tweets that featured under 140 characters, leaving the "brevity of Twitter" intact.
Only 5 percent of tweets sent out were longer than 140 characters, and only 2 percent were longer than 190 characters, so Twitter believes the new character limit should not "substantially change" timelines for most users.
280-character tweets have been limited to a small group of users since the end of September, but the feature is rolling out to everyone starting today. When the new limit is activated, the tweet interface on the web displays a circle that gradually fills up as you type rather than a numbered countdown.
The new Twitter character limit is already available to many users who did not previously have access. Twitter warns that there may be an uptick in novelty tweets and tweets using the full character limit as the feature rolls out, but the company expects this to die down over the course of the next week or two.
Top Rated Comments
(View all)Still can’t get an edit tweet button
The potential for abuse of this feature far outweighs the inconvenience of having to delete and retype a tweet. (Or copy, delete, paste, edit)."I have already made this [tweet] too long, for which I must crave pardon, not having now time to make it shorter." -- Ben Franklin
For certain accounts like press outlets, a larger limit makes sense. But overall this will just reduce readability as people will have more words with which to say exactly the same thing.
This thing that you are saying is simply not the true representation of how people will compose their own tweets when you remove the character limit that is currently 140 characters but will now be more characters, with the new limit being up to 280, which is twice as long as the Old limit which was 140 characters.