For some time now, Twitter has been testing a 280-character limit. Starting today, Twitter has started rolling out the new limit for everyone. There are a few things to keep in mind, however.
Twitter doesn’t want a apocalyptic flood of massive tweets on its hands. To avoid such issue, it’s taking some necessary steps. According to its data, the number of tweets with a higher-than-average character count was small after initial novelty wore off. More specifically speaking, only about 5 percent of tweets sent by testers were actually longer than 140 characters.
Twitter’s Product Manager Aliza Rosen says that:
We saw when people needed to use more than 140 characters, they Tweeted more easily and more often. But importantly, people Tweeted below 140 most of the time and the brevity of Twitter remained.
Twitter seems to have the idea that rolling out such feature isn’t completely necessary but it will roll it out. It doesn’t seem to want to commit to the 240 limit, opening the route for a possible rollback in the future, should it choose to.
For now though, it is rolling out the feature for almost everybody. The new limit will be available to all languages that have problems with cramming. According to a Twitter spokesperson, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese languages don’t require a higher limit due to languages inherently having more meaning that’s packed into every characters, as opposed to English, for example. Because of this, the limit may not be raised for everyone, but will be raised for most.
