• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, September 27, 2017

To encourage more tweeting, Twitter is finally budging on its long-held 140-character limit.

Rather than a sweeping change, the social giant plans to test a more lenient 280-character limit among a “small group” of users, Twitter’s Aliza Rosen and Ikuhiro Ihara note in a new blog post.

While the change seems obvious to anyone who has struggled to squeeze a thought into 140 characters, Twitter’s product manager and senior software engineer said the decision was based on research.  

“Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people Tweeting in English,” according to Rosen and Ihara. “Also, in all markets, when people don’t have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people tweeting,” they explain.

This isn’t Twitter’s first attempt to loosen its artificial limitations on user expression.

Earlier this year, it stopped counting @usernames toward tweets’ 140-character limit. In tests, Twitter found the change encouraged people to engage in “conversations.”

More broadly, the character test is part of a years-long effort to reach a mass audience. To that end, Twitter recently relaunched its flagship app, including a new side navigation menu, and fewer tabs.

Twitter also “refined” and standardized the app’s typography, added bolder headlines and more “intuitive icons” to make it easier to engage with tweets.

Showing new signs of life, Twitter reported strong user growth during the first quarter of 2017. The social giant said it added about 9 million new users -- making it the biggest quarterly bump in years.

Yet, calling Twitter’ recovery into question, the company said it lost $116.5 million during the second quarter of the year. During the period, Twitter also failed to grow its monthly user base from the prior quarter.