For years Twitter users have complained about the 140 character restriction, and now, it looks like the San Francisco-based company has finally listened.
On Tuesday, November 7, Twitter (NYSE:$TWTR) announced in a blog post that it will be rolling out the 280-character limit to any language that experiences “cramming” characters to be an issue. This is significant news as the length is twice as long as Twitter’s current character limit.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise as the online giant first commenced experimenting with longer tweets in September. Essentially, the change was meant to give users more space to express themselves in languages where Twitter felt the 140 character restriction was limited.
According to Twitter, users will see the change roll out over the course of the next few days.
In the blog post, Twitter wrote that 9% of English letter tweets reached the 140 character limit, which leads users to edit their tweets or not send them at all. After the company expanded the limit to 280 characters, only 1% of tweets experienced this issue.
“It’s worth emphasizing again that people in the test got very excited about the extra space in the beginning and many Tweets went way beyond 140,” Aliza Rosen, Twitter’s product manager, wrote.
“People did silly (creative!) things like writing 1 character per line to make their Tweets extra large. It was a temporary effect and didn’t last long. We’ll definitely see some of this novelty effect spike again with this week’s launch and expect it to resume to normal behavior soon after.”
Featured Image: depositphotos/ArtemSam
