I remember when Twitter was very new and people were praising their new idea of allowing only 140 characters for posting their tweets. Many reasons were given – who really has time to write more than 140 characters, people are too busy to read long messages and so on. The small blue bird and the limited number of characters per tweet was an instant hit with people. But it seems that times have changed now – Twitter has given up on the brevity of tweets and has finally decided to extend the characters limit from 140 to 280 for each tweet.
Another change that you will notice in Twitter is that now it does not display the number of character remaining when you are typing a new tweet. Instead it displays a small circle that gets filled as you type in the text for your new tweet. However when you cross the 280 character limit, it does display the number of characters that you have exceeded in your tweet. This same design is being used on the website as well as apps for iPhone and Android. Perhaps this design was adopted to make sure that they can extend the character limit in the future without having to make any changes in the user interface.
In order to upgrade the character limit in the apps, you will have to update the apps in iPhone or Android to the latest versions. But you do not have to do anything if you use Twitter in the web browser of your desktop or notebook computer. If you use third party apps and plugins, then they need to be updated as well whenever new versions are available.
One of the benefit of raising the character limit is that now you do not have to divide your message in multiple parts. Now you can tweet anything you want in just one go (if you keep it under 280 characters).