Twitter is testing longer tweets

It's finally happening: Twitter is testing extending tweets beyond 140 characters — to 280 characters, to be exact. On Tuesday, the company said it's experimenting with allowing all languages except Chinese, Japanese, and Korean to have twice as many characters as its signature length. Of course, this is still a small test, so it may not be a permanent change.

Why it's doing this: Twitter says that a lot of users are frustrated with the tweet length limit, which seems to make it harder to express themselves (except in Chinese, Japanese and Korean). Rumors of this change have been around for some time. Last year, for example, the company was said to be considering letting users tweet up to a staggering 10,000 characters. Twitter found that 9% of English tweets have 140 characters (most have around 34 characters), compared to only 0.4% of Japanese tweets that have 140 characters.

Go deeper: Twitter's blog post on the change.