Twitter is officially expanding its character count to 280.
On Tuesday afternoon (7 November), the social media site announced it will double the character limit from 140 to 280 characters for nearly all users.
The change will be effective in nearly all languages, with the exception of Chinese, Japanese and Korean; because users can already say more using far fewer characters.
Having said that, a lot of people still seem to be waiting for those extra characters to roll in:
Alas, there could actually be a perfectly good explanation for that.
As seen in the above image, instead of '140' showing in the bottom right-hand corner of the tweet box (like it used to), some users are getting this round circle instead.
While the text box is empty, the circle will be faint. But when you start typing it will turn gold, and then when you exceed the 280-limit it will turn red.
The new feature will also give you a 20-character warning when you reach 260 characters. As demonstrated right here:
So, if you don't think you have those characters yet, look out for the circle.
The concept of 280-character tweets was introduced by Twitter in September, when it announced it would be extending the word count of some users – but only on a trial basis.
Back then, the decision was met with backlash by sceptical tweeters; arguing that the 140-character limit was good practice for word economy and also that a higher character count should not be prioritised above tackling the site's troll problem and introducing an edit tweet function.
Nonetheless, after a two-month trial, Twitter has deemed the change an improvement to its service and is going ahead on a much wider and more permanent scale.
"People who had more room to Tweet received more engagement (Likes, Retweets, @mentions), got more followers, and spent more time on Twitter," said the company in a blog post.
"We saw when people needed to use more than 140 characters, they Tweeted more easily and more often. But importantly, people Tweeted below 140 most of the time and the brevity of Twitter remained."
Yet, the people of Twitter remain undecided.
