When Twitter announced in September it was ending its iconic 140-character limit, some people were less than impressed.
The roll out has been gradual but this week nearly everyone should have the new 280-character limit for their tweets.
However, many users are a bit overwhelmed by their new extended character limit.
Or seriously over-excited. (Cue the most annoying tweets EVER.)
Users tweeting in Chinese, Japanese and Korean will still have the original limit. That’s because writing in those languages uses fewer characters.
The company says 9 percent of tweets written in English hit the 140-character limit. People end up spending more time editing tweets or don’t send them out at all.
Although many are enjoying their new doubled word limit, some people think an edit button would be more useful.
Twitter hopes that the expanded limit will get more people tweeting more, helping its lackluster user growth.
Twitter has been testing the new limit for weeks and is starting to roll it out Tuesday.
Those who haven’t got the upgraded limit yet are feeling a bit left out.
The company has been slowly easing restrictions to let people cram more characters into a tweet.
It stopped counting polls, photos, videos and other things toward the limit. Even before it did so, users found creative ways to get around the limit. This includes multi-part tweets and screenshots of blocks of text.
Twitter’s character limit was created so that tweets could fit into a single text message, back when many people were using texts to receive tweets.
But now, most people use Twitter through its mobile app; the 140-character limit is no longer a technical constraint but nostalgia.