Twitter doubles tweet length for some users

By Selena Larson

If brevity is the soul of wit, Twitter is about to get a lot less clever.

For the first time in history, Twitter (TWTR, Tech30) is changing its character limit.

The service announced on Tuesday it is doubling its character count for tweets -- from 140 characters to 280 characters -- for some of its users. The test group will include those who tweet in certain languages, including English, Spanish and Portuguese.

Twitter cofounder and CEO Jack Dorsey has hinted at expanding the character limit before. Earlier this year, Twitter removed user handles -- a person's Twitter name preceded by the @ sign -- from replies to tweets, instead linking them in text above the tweet.

Twitter says it hopes people will embrace the change. But considering the move strays from its core design, it's likely to cause some backlash.

The decision to limit the tweet character to 140 stems from text messaging. SMS messages are capped at 160 characters before they're split in two texts. Dorsey has said founders wanted tweets to be able to fit in a text message: 140 characters for the tweet, and 20 characters for the username.