Twitter Users Are Will Notice A Big Change When They Log In Today

James Fenton

If you feel like 140 Twitter characters aren’t enough to express your feelings then we’ve got good news for you.

From last night, the social network doubled the amount of characters people can use to 280 meaning we can now have twice the fun with our inane ramblings.

A couple of months back, certain high-profile accounts were given access to the new format as a test.

A press release said:

“In September, we launched a test that expanded the 140 character limit so that every person around the world could express themselves easily in a Tweet. Our goal was to make that possible while ensuring we keep the speed and brevity that makes Twitter, Twitter. Looking at all the data, we’re excited to share we’ve achieved this goal and are rolling this change out to all languages where cramming was an issue.*

“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 (more on this below). 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.”

Twitter feels that despite users having access to longer tweets in recent weeks, most have still kept them short and sweet.

“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. But that didn’t happen. Only 5% of Tweets sent were longer than 140 characters and only 2% were over 190 characters. As a result, your timeline reading experience should not substantially change, you’ll still see about the same amount of Tweets in your timeline. For reference, in the timeline, Tweets with an image or poll usually take up more space than a 190 character Tweet.

“It’s worth emphasising again that people in the test got very excited about the extra space in the beginning and many Tweets went way beyond 140. People did silly (creative!) things like writing one 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 behaviour soon after.”