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Twitter just announced it's testing a 280-character limit, and everyone is tweeting about it
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Twitter announced on Tuesday that it was testing out a new 280-character limit for its tweets. Thats double the length of the current tweets, which rests at about 140. - photo by Herb Scribner
Twitter is about to change.

What appears to be President Donald Trump's favorite social media platform announced on Tuesday that it was testing out a new 280-character limit for its tweets. Thats double the length of the current tweets, which rests at about 140.

We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we're doing something new: we're going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming (which is all except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean), the company said in a blog post. Although this is only available to a small group right now, we want to be transparent about why we are excited to try this.

According to Recode, Twitter hopes doubling the number of characters will inspire more people to, well, tweet.

In its blog post, Twitter said the current 140-character limit pressures people into deleting words or phrases that would enhance their tweets.

When people dont have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people Tweeting, the company wrote.

The 140-character space which was 160 characters when the app started has become a defining trait of the social network.







Twitter has long since considered expanding its tweet length, according to The Verge. In 2015, rumors suggested tweets would stretch to 10,000 characters. This would have been implemented alongside a ranked timeline, which would have shown the best tweets first, sources told The Verge.

The company held off from increasing tweet character limits to avoid becoming another Facebook.

Still, super-sized tweets are likely to change the nature of the network as more people gain access to them, and in unpredictable ways, according to The Verge.

Twitter users shared their opinions about longer tweets on Tuesday afternoon.





































Twitter understands not everyone's happy with the decision.

We understand since many of you have been Tweeting for years, there may be an emotional attachment to 140 characters we felt it, too, the company said in its blog post. But we tried this, saw the power of what it will do, and fell in love with this new, still brief, constraint. We are excited to share this today, and we will keep you posted about what we see and what comes next.
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