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Need More Room? Twitter Testing 280 Character Limit

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Need more room to type those deep thoughts? Twitter is testing a 280-character limit, doubling the current length restriction that's been in place since the company's founding 11 years ago.

The test is being made available to a small subset of users and applies to languages other than Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. That's because in those languages, Twitter notes, you can convey about double the amount of information in one character as you can in others.

The limit was created so tweets would fit in a single text message back when people used Twitter that way. But most people now use Twitter through its mobile app, where there isn't the same technical constraint.

Twitter has already eased the restrictions, and doesn't count photos, videos and other things toward the character limit.

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