Twitter has extended the character limits for tweets to 280

The tweets in your timeline are about to get super-sized and Christmas just came early for Donald Trump. Twitter said today that it has started testing 280-character tweets, doubling the previous character limit, in an effort to help users be more expressive. “Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people tweeting in English,” the company said in a blog post. “When people don’t have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people Tweeting — which is awesome!”

About 9 percent of all tweets today are exactly 140 characters, Twitter says. It’s tough to do that on accident, suggesting that users frequently have to edit their initial thoughts to get them under the limit. Now Twitter hopes to ease that burden by doubling the character limit in what it calls “languages impacted by cramming,” which includes every language except for Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.

The rationale for excluding those languages is that users can fit more thoughts into fewer characters given the nature of their written language. The average length of a tweet in Japanese is 15 characters, and only 0.4 percent of tweets hit the 140-character limit, Twitter says. Still, the company said it is open to revisiting the subject of expanded tweets for Asian languages as it learns more.

The 140-character limit was originally established to reflect the length of SMS messages, which was how tweets were distributed prior to the development of mobile apps. SMS messages are limited to 160 characters; Twitter reserved the remaining 20 for the username. As often happens in creative mediums, the constraint spurred creativity, and Twitter became a fast-moving, newsy, jokey, weirdo playground

Still, super-sized tweets are likely to change the nature of the network as more people gain access to them, and in unpredictable ways. Will those multi-message “tweetstorms” shrink into a smaller number of tweets, or will the expanded real estate encourage people to write even more? What new kinds of jokes and memes are possible at 280 characters that were not possible at 140?

We’ll soon find out. Most Twitter applications should already be able to show longer tweets, thanks to changes that the company introduced to its API last year. You’ll know you have expanded tweets if the character counter at the bottom right-hand corner of the composer looks like a circle. It will count down from 280 until you run out of room.

“We understand since many of you have been Tweeting for years, there may be an emotional attachment to 140 characters — we felt it, too,” the company said in its blog post. “But we tried this, saw the power of what it will do, and fell in love with this new, still brief, constraint. We are excited to share this today, and we will keep you posted about what we see and what comes next.”