Twitter plays long game with 280-character limit

TWITTER has granted all of its users the ability to post 280-character tweets, doubling the limit that has defined the social network since its inception.

The company provoked a fierce backlash from its notoriously outspoken user base when it started to test the change in September, with some complaining that it would ruin the essence of the microblogging service – its brevity.

But Twitter said its experiment with 280 characters had shown that people were not abusing the feature.

It said those users who had access to longer tweets only went past the original 140-character limit five per cent of the time, and only past 190 characters two per cent of the time. It added that those who had the increased limit during the test spent more time on Twitter, and received more likes and retweets.

From 9pm last night, the 280-character tweets became available to all users – although some will not have the updated capacity immediately. Japanese, Korean and Chinese language users will remain at 140 characters, since those alphabets allow people to say more in fewer characters. As well as enjoying the opportunity to say more themselves, many users will be watching for how Donald Trump, the US president, who was not part of the trial despite his proclivity for the site, uses his extra characters.