Twitter is experimenting with a change to the character limit, moving the limit from 140 to 280 characters. They are slowly rolling this out to selected accounts, with no clear commitment, yet, to rolling this out to the universe.

From the official Twitter blog post:

Trying to cram your thoughts into a Tweet – we’ve all been there, and it’s a pain.

Interestingly, this isn’t a problem everywhere people Tweet. For example, when I (Aliza) Tweet in English, I quickly run into the 140 character limit and have to edit my Tweet down so it fits. Sometimes, I have to remove a word that conveys an important meaning or emotion, or I don’t send my Tweet at all. But when Iku Tweets in Japanese, he doesn’t have the same problem. He finishes sharing his thought and still has room to spare. This is because in languages like Japanese, Korean, and Chinese you can convey about double the amount of information in one character as you can in many other languages, like English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French.

We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we’re doing something new: we’re going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming (which is all except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean).

And:

Although we feel confident about our data and the positive impact this change will have, we want to try it out with a small group of people before we make a decision to launch to everyone.

Read on for the logic behind this change. But the change is in the wild, so you will likely see 280 char tweets in your stream.

This BBC article covers the change and includes some cheeky tweets in response to the change. My favorite is this one.

Want to try your hand at a 280 character tweet? It’ll take a bit of work, but I’ve jumped through the hoops myself (here’s my test tweet) and it works. No guarantees Twitter won’t close this loophole.

Here’s a link to The Next Web post [H/T Ben Lovejoy – Nice find, Ben!] that lays out the technique. In a nutshell, you fire up Chrome, open up the TweetDeck web client, open the Snippets editor, paste in some code and bam, you’ve now got 280 characters to play with.

Have fun, and feel free to tweet at me in all your 280 character glory.

UPDATE: Shawn King found an even easier way to up your limit, via TamperMonkey. Here’s a link to a how-to post.