Christmas has come early for talkative tweeters. Starting this week, Twitter will roll out its 280 character tweet limit to all 330-million of its users.
The trusty 140 character limit — which has been in effect since Twitter’s launch back in 2006 — will now become a thing of the past for users not tweeting in Japanese, Korean or Chinese.
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The company decided to make the change official after a limited trial period in September.
During said trial, a select number of users experienced double the number of characters available to use in a tweet. Granted, some didn’t quite take it as seriously as most, while others managing more information critical accounts used the change to disseminate more information to their followers.
Twitter’s 140 character tweet limit has been in place for over 11 years
Twitter’s product manager Aliza Rosen also acknowledged the above, but noted that after general user hype subsided, the company saw an interesting return to centre.
“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,” she explained in a blog post.
Sometimes, comedy can outweigh the need for brevity too:
In the criminal justice system, sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous. In New York City, the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad known as the Special Victims Unit. These are their stories. *DUN DUN*
— Law and Order: SVU (@nbcsvu) November 7, 2017
sorry, no. there’s a mistake. Moonlight, u guys won best picture. Moonlight won. this is not a joke. come up here. this a not a joke, i’m afraid they read the wrong thing. this is not a joke. Moonlight has won best picture. Moonlight: Best Picture.
— hunter harris (@hunteryharris) November 7, 2017
While you don’t quite need to use all 280 characters all the time, Twitter will be rolling out the change to users across the world in the coming days.
Feature image: Memeburn
