MUMBAI: Twitter has announced that it is expanding the tweet limit from 140 characters to 280 characters - double the existing limit.

Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey said that it was is a small change yet a significant move for the company. Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen and software engineer Ikuhiro Ihara said it was a pain trying to cram one's thoughts into a tweet - a longer limit would be tried out in the languages impacted by cramming.

The new limits are only available to a "small group" of users, to check out how it works for the initial users before Twitter decides to roll out the changes widely.

Twitter has planned to leave the old 140-character limit in place for tweets in Japanese, Korean and Chinese because the internal data showed written characters in those languages packed plenty into the allotted space.

A Twitter blog post observed that only 0.4 per cent of tweets sent in Japanese use the complete 140-character limit, compared to nine per cent of English tweets.

Twitter, in the last quarter, reported its base of monthly active users (MAUs) was at 328 million. Its growth has not kept pace with the leader Facebook, which has around two billion users, and its sister company Instagram, with 800 million.