After a short test with select users, Twitter has decided to double the length of tweets from 140 characters to 280 characters.
“We are making this change after listening and observing a problem our global community was having, studying data to understand how we could improve, trying it out, and listening to your feedback,” Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen explains. “We’ll continue listening and working to make Twitter easier for everyone while making sure we keep what you love.”
While I was originally very unhappy with the 140 character limit on Twitter—I tend to overwrite, if anything—I quickly adapted. And now, I really appreciate the beauty of brevity. So I’m curious to see whether doubling the tweet character limit will change the service fundamentally.
Twitter says it will not.
“We—and many of you—were concerned that timelines may fill up with 280 character Tweets, and people with the new limit would always use up the whole space,” Rosen says. “But that didn’t happen [during the test]. Only 5 percent of Tweets sent were longer than 140 characters and only 2 percent were over 190 characters. As a result, your timeline reading experience should not substantially change, [and] you’ll still see about the same amount of Tweets in your timeline.”