4 ms·
They got rid of the SMS-related limitations ages ago, but kept the 140 limit because it was "part of what makes Twitter - Twitter". It's also why Twitter is re
by Nadya 11y ago
They got rid of the SMS-related limitations ages ago, but kept the 140 limit because it was "part of what makes Twitter - Twitter".
It's also why Twitter is really popular in Japan. 140 characters is more than enough to hold actual conversations (even if most statements/responses are typically 12-20 characters and the rest of the space is used for emoji)
- comex 11y agoWhich one might call a "natural experiment" for how increasing the limit would affect English speakers' use of the service. (But I don't think Twitter will do it - the number 140 is so well known, it's basically part of its identity.)
- byuu 11y agoI think Twitter's popularity in Japan, despite the fact that 140 characters there can convey a message that's 3-4x larger than in English, is indicative that increasing the English character count to somewhere between 280-560 (or much better, moving to word counts instead) would not be the death sentence for the service that many make it out to be.
- e12e 11y agoFYI as has been posted to hn earlier wrt why sms were 160 characters, which lead to 140 character tweets w/20 characters reserved for user names: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-text-messaging.html http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-... It's rather interesting that the 160 character limit isn't arbitrary - but also doesn't account for eg: URLs in text.