For the first time since launching in 2006, Twitter has officially expanded its original 140-character limit to 280. Effectively doubling the number of characters that people can use in their tweets.

The expanded character limit was made available to several high profile users in September, as a means of testing it out. I guess the tests went well, because Twitter is officially rolling the feature out to all of its users. According to the company, the change  results in people spending less time editing their tweets; which also means that people will now be more inclined to tweet.

This is all fine and dandy, but it seems that the new 280-character limit only applies to users of latin-based keyboard standards. The company confirmed that users posting in symbol based languages, including Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, do not have the same “cramming” issue that most other languages have. As such, users who speak and tweet in these aforementioned languages will not get the new 280 character limit.

Just like the iconic Instagram Square, Twitter’s 140-character limit became somewhat of a novelty in the technology world. To this day, you still get pop-culture jokes in television series and movies about the character limit. I am quite keen to see how this new change will affect things going forward. Of course, now we have to get used to the millions of 280-character tweets. It downright sounds exhaustive to me.

The social media giant did not say exactly when everyone would have this feature, but I have already noticed that many people who I follow have received the update. With that said, and as great as having a night mode and more characters in a tweet is, what most users really want is an ‘edit tweet’ option. No word on whether that will ever see the light of day, but one can dream.

[Sources: BBC, Finances 24, iDownload Blog, The Verge]

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Junior Editor at Vamers. From Superman to Ironman; Bill Rizer to Sam Fisher and everything in-between, Edward loves it all. He is a Bachelor of Arts student and English Major specialising in Language and Literature. He is an avid writer and casual social networker with a flare for all things tech related.