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takyon writes:

The "testing" is over. Twitter has officially raised the character limit to 280:

Avid tweeters such as President Trump were often forced to send multiple tweets to express their thoughts on a single subject given the constrictions of the previous limit.

Twitter explained after testing the 280-character limit that "people needed to use more than 140 characters, they Tweeted more easily and more often."

The company also preemptively addressed concerns that the structure of Twitter would change from the new character limit. "We – and many of you – were concerned that timelines may fill up with 280 character Tweets, and people with the new limit would always use up the whole space. But that didn't happen," Twitter said. "As a result, your timeline reading experience should not substantially change, you'll still see about the same amount of Tweets in your timeline."

Twitter said that the new character limit won't be accessible to Japanese, Korean or Chinese-language tweets.

Two German Twitter users managed to boldly break the limit by adding a massive URL:

Over the weekend, two German Twitter users successfully broke the existing character limit by sending a 35,000-character tweet. By formatting a message as a URL with extensive gibberish, they were able to absurdly pollute followers' timelines. Twitter soon removed it, but for a moment, all the complaints about the length of 280-character tweets seemed insignificant in the face of such a monster.

Original Submission