>I wonder what impact of 20 more characters would be in terms of hardware and bandwidth at Twitter's scale. I'm sure they're concerned less with the technical

>I wonder what impact of 20 more characters would be in terms of hardware and bandwidth at Twitter's scale. I'm sure they're concerned less with the technical impact than the risk of changing the product somewhat drastically. The char limit is a fundamental aspect of twitter. It forces people to create curt, easily digestible content. Expanding that limit might have pretty bad side effects, such as people communicating the same message they would have in 140 chars, but more verbosely (which weakens the product).