Today, Twitter announced that they will roll out the 280 character limit to everyone. This was thanks to a successful beta test that started all the way back in September where a group of people were given the power to express more in a tweet.
This is a big change and a clear departure by Twitter as they try to make sure that tweet more stuff but still relatively less than the other social networks. Back in September, 280 character limit was cool and this led to people coming up with hacks that will allow you to tweet upto 280 characters, although those were quickly patched up.
Well, everyone now has 280 characters, which means it is boring, in a way. There are a subset of users who are still adamant that the 140 character limit shouldn’t have been expanded and luckily, there is a hack for you.
Slate developers have come up with a new Chrome extension, which they have aptly named 140, which will cut down your tweet character limit to 140 characters and also for everyone else’s.
You only need to head over to Chrome Web Store, download and install the extension and refresh twitter.com. Since Twitter has removed the tweet character counter in the new update, the only way for you to know if you’ve reached the limit is by the progress sign turning red in colour.
Slate says that there might be bugs like URLs won’t look great and if you paste texts to tweets can screw up the character count.l However, this is a handy extension for that regular Twitter user who would want to maintain the status quo.