Twitter Tests Doubling Their Character Limit to 280

On Tuesday afternoon Twitter announced on Twitter that it would be rolling out an idea which would allow their users to double their character limit from 140 to 280.

The company's CEO, Jack Dorsey, tweeted out that the 140-character limit was just an arbitrary choice that no longer applied in the modern world anyway:

And the service's co-founder, Biz Stone, sent out a message with a similar theme:

Twitter also justified their move by sending out a blog post which argued that people who tweet in English are at a disadvantage due to less expressive characters than a language like, say, Japanese. They also said that people tweet more when they can actually say what they want to say, instead of having to save space by writing like a teenager (u r 2 cute, c u 2moro, shit like that) or abruptly ending messages by punctuating with something like "Sad!"

"Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people tweeting in English," they said. "When people don’t have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people Tweeting—which is awesome!"

While you may be wondering "What the hell do they mean by research?" The company did add that roughly nine percent of tweets end at exactly 140 characters, meaning most people probably edit over and over. If you have an account, you know how obnoxious this can be. Twitter had reportedly been exploring this expansion idea for years (remember that whole 10,000 character thing?), so we guess it was only a matter of time.

As for whether or not this is permanent, we don't know yet. But this final paragraph from their blog post makes it sound like their minds are pretty made up on the subject:

"An emotional attachment to 140 characters—we felt it, too." Good God, some people take social media too seriously.