Twitter to double character limit to 280

Twitter users may no longer need to limit their tweets to 140 characters, which has been the hallmark of the service since its launch in 2006.

Twitter said on Tuesday that it planned to test with a random sample of users allowing them to send tweets that are as long as 280 characters, double the existing cap, in most languages around the world.

The short message format has been the defining characteristic of the San Francisco-based company, that perfectly synched with the the company logo and its name- twitter, like the chirping of birds, even as users found ways around the limit, such as posting photos of text.

In a blog post on Tuesday, Twitter said its emphasis on brevity would never change but that it had been wondering whether it was coming in the way of people expressing themselves freely, and undermining the service's popularity.

"Trying to cram your thoughts into a Tweet - we've all been there, and it's a pain," Twitter project manager Aliza Rosen and senior software engineer Ikuhiro  Ihara said in the post.

The employees acknowledged there may be an ''emotional attachment'' angle for some users to the current limit.

According to some commentators, the announcement might seem like nothing but a nice new feature, but the new step exemplified how Twitter hopes to prop its unprofitable business model.

They say all social media platforms faced the dilemma that when they are successful in attracting users, they have to offer something distinctive. But with new rivals arriving on the scene they have to innovate, which usually means adopting features others offer.

For some years after its roll-out in 2006, it was not possible to include an image with a tweet, one could only link to a picture hosted elsewhere and one had to be careful about the length of URLs.