After testing longer tweets with a subset of its users for the past two months, Twitter is now officially making 280-character tweets available to everyone. (Variety)
The update, which rolled out across the service on Tuesday, upends what’s been one of Twitter’s most iconic features for more than a decade. The change will not affect tweets in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. (Mashable)
Twitter doubled its 140-character limit to allow for freer expression (and less time editing tweets to meet the sparer character count). Product manager Aliza Rosen said Twitter worried that lifting those constraints would litter timelines with excessively long, rambling tweets, so it conducted a test in September to see what would happen if people had more room to write. After a few days of pushing the limits, people returned to restraint. (Deadline)
According to the company, only 5 percent of tweets sent from people in the 280-character test group were longer than 140 characters, and just 2 percent were more than 190 characters. (CNN)