PSA: Here’s how to get access to 280-character tweets before Twitter rolls it out to all

Twitter revealed yesterday that it would be doubling the maximum length of a tweet from 140 characters to a full 280 characters. Initially, it is rolling out the new limit to a small percentage of users ahead of a wider deployment later …

But if you don’t want to wait, there’s a way to get access to 280-character tweets today. Actually, not just one way, but some of them are techier than others.

The simplest approach, as TNW reported, is to run a Snippet in Chrome to instruct Tweetdeck to give you the new limit. Yep, you read that right: the limit is actually controlled on the client side, rather than on Twitter’s own servers.

Here are the site’s instructions:

• Load up Tweetdeck at tweetdeck.twitter.com.
• Head to View, hover over the Developer menu, and select Developer Tools.
• Find Sources and click on the >> double chevrons to access Snippets.
• Once you open Snippets, click the ‘New Snippet’ button and copy/paste the following code in the empty window on the right.

TD.services.TwitterClient.prototype.makeTwitterCall=function(b,e,f,g,c,d,h){c=c||function(){};d=d||function(){};b=this.request(b,{method:f,params:Object.assign(e,{weighted_character_count:!0}),processor:g,feedType:h});return b.addCallbacks(function(a){c(a.data)},function(a){d(a.req,"",a.msg,a.req.errors)}),b};
twttrTxt=Object.assign({},twttr.txt,{isInvalidTweet:function(){return!1},getTweetLength:function(){return twttr.txt.getTweetLength.apply(this,arguments)-140}});

• Click the Play button below to run the snippet.

One of our readers reports that it also works in Safari.

Open the new tweet pane, open the Web Inspector (⌥⌘I), open the Elements tab, copy and paste the code in the code field at the very bottom (after the chevron), press Return, tweet away!

To open the Web Inspector, enable (if needed) the Debug menu from the Advanced tab in Safari settings, and press ⌥⌘I.

It’s a rather clunky solution, as it only works for the web version of Tweetdeck, and only in the browser you’ve activated, but if you really can’t wait, you can start posting 280-character tweets right away.

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