Welcome to the New 280 Character Limit on Twitter – and How to Use It Right Now
Twitter has always been characterized by its brevity: the 140 character limit was originally envisaged by the SMS data limit. But Twitter users also always found ways to get around this limit by chains “ tweets “ to tweets that use large blocks of text in the form of screenshots . Now the social network is finally getting popular and is doubling the character limit to 280 characters.
When can you start sharing longer tweets? And what does this mean for the future of Twitter? Here’s what you need to know.
When do longer tweets appear?
The 280-character tweets are still in beta and are currently only available to a “small group” (including co-founders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone). The message in the blog, explaining the change, Twitter did not say when the new feature will be available to all.
Based on previous updates, this could take several months. Back in May 2016, Twitter announced that media attachments such as GIFs and polls would no longer count towards the character limit on a tweet, but it took five months to roll out the new feature. Doubling the length of all tweets is an even bigger change, although Twitter may be better positioned to roll out this update quickly.
How to start writing longer tweets now
While the official rollout is still undecided, The Verge has found a way to unlock the new 280 character limit right now using Chrome and some lightweight coding. Web developer Juliet Preto has provided an even simpler option on her website. Twitter may decide to block these workarounds, but they seem to work for now if you want to impress your followers.
What does this mean for Twitter?
With this update, Twitter is mainly responding to the fact that its users have already demonstrated what they want from the social network. Longer tweets will make the service easier to use, so you don’t need to edit your post to fit in 140 characters. This should encourage more people to use Twitter and tweet more often.
Twitter also explained that its character limit is actually stricter, depending on what language you write in. For example, 9% of all tweets written in English are 140 characters long, but in Japanese only 0.4% hit the old limit. As such, this update could help increase Twitter usage in some countries (including the US) and expand it to others.
On the other hand, longer tweets can also make Twitter more difficult by replacing quick jokes and comments with larger chunks of text. Longer tweets are also a slippery slope. Now that we’ve dropped the 140 character limit, what could stop a company from expanding to 1000 characters, or remove the character limit altogether?
Of course, every time a social network announces a big change, people find a reason to complain. But in most cases, we get used to it after a few months. It is likely that it will happen here as well.
In the meantime, the Twitter community is doing what it does best: joking.