Twitter’s iconic 140-character limit for tweets may be on the way out. In the hope that it will encourage more people to post, Twitter is doubling the number of characters that some users get for a tweet. The test means that a small group of Twitter users will now get 280 characters per tweet instead of the traditional 140 characters.
Twitter’s character limit is a holdover from the app’s early days when tweets were sent as texts, which were limited to 160 characters. It has since become one of the product’s defining characteristics. The company explained its decision to expand the limit in a blog post Tuesday, claiming that there are times the limit forces people to “remove a word that conveys an important meaning or emotion,” or keeps people from tweeting altogether.
Which explains why Twitter is finally testing an expanded character limit: It hopes more space will mean more tweets.