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Yeah, this reasoning especially also struck me as weird, because Twitter's 140 character limit was chosen from an English-speaking viewpoint. The limit for Asia
by 482794793792894 9y ago
Yeah, this reasoning especially also struck me as weird, because Twitter's 140 character limit was chosen from an English-speaking viewpoint. The limit for Asian languages should have been adjusted downwards as early as Twitter launched (though I suppose that's actually somewhat hard to do from a technological viewpoint, as people might mix Western letters and Asian symbols).
And then they point out that in Asian countries people tweet more, so alright, who cares about history, do what works best.
But you shouldn't just be looking at how many tweets are written. People are going to post more, just because it's easier to post something. That doesn't mean that people actually read these longer tweets just as much.
Like, there is a feedback loop here, people would also start to tweet less, if they didn't bother reading tweets, because many tweets are also responses to other tweets, but still, this reasoning seems quite a bit oversimplified.
- hkmurakami 9y agoIn Japan at least, the anonymity factor was at least as strong as the information density factor (TWTR > FB for a very long time there because people there generally don't want to tie their irl identities to online accounts).
- bogomipz 9y ago>"Yeah, this reasoning especially also struck me as weird, because Twitter's 140 character limit was chosen from an English-speaking viewpoint." I don't believe this is correct but rather 140 characters limit was chosen because SMS will break a message greater than 160 characters into two messages. 140 characters leaves 20 characters for a username.
- e12e 9y agoWell, it's correct in that 160 characters was chosen from a German (I presume, possibly English/"European") viewpoint, for sms...: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-text-messaging.html http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-...
- bogomipz 9y agoI've heard this story before and I think it might be apocryphal. Usually that same LA Times piece is cited as well. More likely is that 160 characters was what the GSM signaling channel comfortably allowed, essentially making it free. Its still this way today - SMS uses an out of band signaling channel and cell phone companies charge you as data.
- mads 9y ago140 characters is an 8 bit SMS message. 160 characters is a 7 bit SMS message. You can also send a UCS2 encoded SMS, which can contain 70 characters.
- improbable22 9y agoWhen I type an actual SMS, the 160 limit seems to be reduced if I add non-English characters, like emoji or possibly even just an em-dash. So they could simply have followed SMS more closely, 140 bytes or something.
- mads 9y agoThe 140 character limit was chosen based on sending 8bit SMS messages. If it was chosen from an English speaking viewpoint, they could have chosen to base it on GSM 7bit SMS, which would allow 160 characters. Was the default SMS 8bit in the US at the time or? Asian languages would require UCS2 encoded SMS messages, which can contain 70 characters as far as I remember.