Twitter extended the 140-character limit of tweets to 280 characters for a test group of users in September. In a blog post today, Twitter’s Aliza Rosen proclaimed the test a success noting that the additional characters have been used where needed, but that most tweets remain under the previous 140-character limit.

As a result, Twitter has begun to roll out the new feature worldwide for every language where ‘cramming’ was an issue. The company describes cramming as:

the deviation of the actual length distribution from the theoretical log-normal distribution near the character limit — “cramming,” as it likely reflects people’s attempts to “cram” their Tweets within the character limit.

In plain English, cramming is when your tweet is just a little long, and you spend time editing it to fit into 140 characters. According to Rosen:

Historically, 9% of Tweets in English hit the character limit. This reflects the challenge of fitting a thought into a Tweet, often resulting in lots of time spent editing and even at times abandoning Tweets before sending. With the expanded character count, this problem was massively reduced – that number dropped to only 1% of Tweets running up against the limit. Since we saw Tweets hit the character limit less often, we believe people spent less time editing their Tweets in the composer. This shows that more space makes it easier for people to fit thoughts in a Tweet, so they could say what they want to say, and send Tweets faster than before.

Cramming is a bigger problem for some languages than others. At the other end of the spectrum are languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which can express more in fewer characters and will continue to have 140-character limits.

The new tweet length limit is still rolling out to users. If you don’t have 280 characters to work with yet, check the official Twitter again later because it will undoubtedly take a while to propagate to all users.

Alex Kantrowitz of BuzzFeed shares news on a feature Twitter recently rolled out in its iOS app:

Now you can view tweets sorted by topic, without having to follow anyone, right in Twitter’s Explore tab…Twitter’s algorithms will show you these topics based on what they know about your interests. Eventually, the platform will give users more control over what they see, the spokesperson said. The company will roll out controls that allow people to tell it they don’t like a topic, which will inform Twitter’s decisions on what to show them.

These featured topics are the first major addition to Twitter’s app since it launched a refreshed design earlier this summer; combined with those previous changes, topics make the Explore tab a more attractive place than ever to visit. As the home to search, Moments, trending hashtags, and now tweets organized by topic, Twitter has created an information hub worthy of one of its four primary tabs.

My favorite tidbit from the Buzzfeed piece is that Twitter plans to give users more control over which topics they see. Hopefully this isn’t limited to simply disliking certain topics, but instead will extend to offering full control of topics you want to see. There are certain topics I’d love to keep up with, but that I don’t necessarily want to follow specific accounts for, so a full-fledged list of topics to choose from – whether those topics relate to accounts I’m currently following or not – would be great.

Announced in a blog post earlier today, Twitter has a major update to its iOS app and other platforms rolling out to all users starting today.

The new design is inspired by Twitter’s Android client – and while that detail scared me at first, using the updated iOS app for a few minutes allayed all my fears. This is a clean, beautiful redesign that brings few drastic alterations, and instead focuses on lots of nice polishing touches.

The most significant change to the iOS app is the existence of a new sidebar menu that pops out from the left side of the screen. This menu provides a quick way to switch between different accounts, and also lists your Following and Follower counts, navigation buttons to access your Profile, Lists, created Moments, and Settings, as well as a handy toggle to switch Night Mode on and off. Everything in the sidebar is clear and well organized, with plenty of breathing room; my initial impression of this new menu is entirely positive.

Outside of the sidebar menu, the rest of the app feels very familiar, but with a variety of small tweaks that improve the overall experience.

• The reply icon has changed to a speech bubble, purportedly to create less confusion for new users.
• With your Profile now available from the sidebar, that leaves only four main navigation tabs: Home, Search, Notifications, and Messages. They all have fresh new icons that look great.
• Safari View Controller is now the default viewer for opening links. For a long while Twitter had been testing Safari View Controller with some groups of users, but making it universal is a welcome, long-overdue change.
• Reply, Retweet, and Like counts will update in real-time as you use the app.
• A variety of visual improvements, such as updated typography that includes the use of bold headers for different sections, rounded avatars, and more.

There’s more to explore, but that covers the bulk of changes.

Overall, I am a big fan of this redesign. The changes add up to a freshly improved, yet still familiar Twitter app, and my fear that it would too strongly resemble an Android app were unfounded. It may closely resemble Twitter for Android, but this still feels very much like an app that belongs on iOS.

Twitter says the changes are rolling out over the next several days, so it’s possible you may not see them yet. Twitter for iOS is available on the App Store.

If you have opened your Twitter direct messages to receive messages from anyone, Twitter now separates them into two buckets: an Inbox and Requests. Your Inbox collects DMs from people you follow, while Requests are DMs from people you don’t follow. You can review Requests without the sender knowing you’ve reviewed their message until you accept it. If you accept a request, that person’s direct messages will be delivered to your Inbox in the future.

Based on some preliminary testing by The Verge, it appears that the new direct message handling functionality is slowly rolling out to users across Twitter’s apps and website.