Twitter 280 Characters, Number Replaced With Circle For Limit

Say goodbye to 140 characters and the countdown that used to appear next to your working tweets, it's all about 280 characters and a slowly filling circle now. In September, Twitter started an experiment to see how users liked and used double the characters than they had traditionally had available to them. This change in the app was given to specific users to test how it would go over among English-speaking users and Twitter must have decided it went over well because on Tuesday it announced the change would be rolling out to all users.

In a blog post, Aliza Rosen, a Twitter project manager wrote, “We are making this change after listening and observing a problem our global community was having (it wasn’t easy enough to Tweet!), studying data to understand how we could improve, trying it out, and listening to your feedback. We’ll continue listening and working to make Twitter easier for everyone while making sure we keep what you love.”

The increased character limit will happen for users in all languages except for Japanese, Korean and Chinese. Users who tweet in those languages will continue to have 140 characters because they routinely don’t hit the 140 character limit, “cramming is not an issue in these languages,” said the blog post. In English, nine percent of tweets generally hit the character limit, said Twitter. With 280 characters, only one percent of tweets hit the limit. “This shows that more space makes it easier for people to fit thoughts in a Tweet, so they could say what they want to say, and send Tweets faster than before,” said the post.

Twitter even tweeted the announcement, and did it in under 140 characters.

Users who weren’t part of the initial trial period found that they had 280 characters on Tuesday. The upped character limit started rolling out immediately after the announcement, but some users were still stuck with 140.

The announcement reignited the conversation about whether 280 characters was something people on Twitter wanted or needed.

But some people were definitely excited about the new limit.

The other change was that instead of the characters counting down as users type out their tweets, they now see a circle that turns blue when they start typing.

As users type the circle fills up and when it connect then the user has reached the character limit.

The new change will be rolling out globally and all users should soon have 280 characters available to them to use for whatever the like. The change is rolling out "over the next few hours," a Twitter spokesperson told International Business Times Tuesday afternoon. If you're eager for the 280 characters you can try updating the Twitter app on your phone to see if that could speed up the process but you might just have to wait a bit for the update to reach your account.