14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter announced today that it finally lift the 140 character limit of tweets on its social networking platform, allowing users worldwide to tweet longer tweets composed of up to 280 characters.
In September, Twitter launched an experimental program, which was available only to a limited numbers of users, to test the 280-characters limit on tweets and see how their infrastructure would react, as well as to monitor if the speed of their platform remains unchanged.
Apparently, the experiment was a success, and now Twitter is rolling out the 280-character limit to all languages that need it (see below for languages that don't need 280 characters). During their research, they also discovered that only 5% of tweets were longer than 140 characters, and only 2% passed 190 characters.
"During the first few days of the test many people Tweeted the full 280 limit because it was new and novel, but soon after behavior normalized," said Aliza Rosen, Product Manager at Twitter. "We saw when people needed to use more than 140 characters, they Tweeted more easily and more often."
Not available to Japanese, Korean, and Chinese users
Therefore, if you've ever wanted to say more on Twitter and couldn't use the popular social network because of the 140-character limit, chances are you can now compose tweets of up to 280 characters as the change is rolling out incrementally to users worldwide. As expected, images and mentions aren't taken into consideration.
Twitter says that the 280 character limit isn't available to Japanese, Korean, and Chinese users because of the density of the writing systems of these languages, which allow users to say more with fewer characters. More details on Twitter's research can be found here. Also check out Twitter's graphic below to see how many users are tweeting over the old 140-character limit.