Twitter makes 280 characters the new normal

It turns out 140 characters isn't really enough after all.

After a little more than a month of testing, Twitter is ready to officially flip the switch on its new 280-character limit. Beginning today, anyone (save for Twitter's Chinese, Japanese, and Korean-speaking users*) can cram a full paragraph's worth of characters into a single tweet.

The update, which will roll out across the service on Tuesday, upends what's been one of Twitter's most iconic features for more than a decade, though the company insists that despite the increased character count it's still committed to "the speed and brevity that makes Twitter, Twitter."

But Twitter says its signature 140-character constraint -- originally born out of the company's roots as an SMS-based service -- also meant that "it wasn’t easy enough to tweet," at least for some (presumably verbose) people. But by raising the threshold from 140 to 280, the company is hoping it will encourage more people to, you know, actually use Twitter.

Twitter first began testing the longer tweets in September when it introduced the feature to a limited set of users. Those tests were apparently successful as Twitter says fewer people have run into its character limitations since it started experimenting with the longer tweets. Twitter shared this graph to illustrate the point:

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Moreover, people who took advantage of the longer character count "received more engagement, got more followers, and spent more time on Twitter" (though a spike in engagement could be at least partly attributed to the initial novelty of seeing longer tweets).

For most users, though, the biggest adjustment will be getting used to large blocks of text filling their timelines.

Though Twitter was long rumored to have been toying with the idea of ditching the 140-character rule -- Dorsey himself made it clear over the years he had no sentimental attachment to it -- reactions to the initial test have been mixed. Some have welcomed the change while others have bemoaned the end of what they see as one of Twitter's greatest strengths: it forces you to get to the point.

Again, Twitter insists none of that is actually changing, and that adding more characters to the mix only helps everyone. But that will likely be little consolation to critics who really just want an edit button.

*Twitter previously said it has no plans to extend its character limit to these languages as they're already structured in a way that already allows speakers to "convey about double the amount of information in one character as you can in many other languages."