It was only just over a month ago that Twitter announced it was experimenting with 280-character tweets, and now the social media giant has decided to make it the norm.
A post by Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen said the character limit for tweets would double from 140 to 280 characters for users in most languages, starting today.
The news follows an experiment by Twitter in September which found that while people continued to tweet less than 140 characters most of the time, 280 characters made it easier for people to tweet, and tweeted more often.
“During the first few days of the test many people tweeted the full 280 limit because it was new and novel, but soon after behaviour normalised,” Rosen said.
“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.”
Rosen noted that Japanese, Korean, and Chinese will continue to have 140 characters, because “cramming” is not an issue in these languages.
