Twitter’s expansion to 280 characters is rolling out publicly today to all users in supported languages, including English. Twitter first experimented with allowing longer tweets in September. The change was made to give people more space to express themselves in certain languages where the company felt the 140 restriction was limiting.
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.
Historically, 9% of tweets in English hit the 140-character limit but only 1% of tweets with the extended character count hit the limit during the trial, according to data published by Twitter.
The new 280 character limit is already hitting the official app, web interface, and Tweetdeck for users in most countries. Instead of a character count, you have a small circle that fills up as you type. However, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese will continue to have the 140 character limit because space is not an issue in these more dense languages. Third-party apps were not able to integrate longer tweets during the test, but presumably that will be an option soon.
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