Any constraint has the power to encourage more thoughtful, creative expression. Even the most draconian censorship regime sometimes results in beautiful works d

Any constraint has the power to encourage more thoughtful, creative expression. Even the most draconian censorship regime sometimes results in beautiful works designed to work around it. But 140 is just an arbitrary number picked for technical reasons a long time ago. There's no reason to think that 140 hits the right balance between brevity and expressiveness. We've simply adapted to this arbitrary limit, in a sort of Stockholm syndrome. Had they picked 100 characters when they first started, and then decided to increase that to 140, we'd be having this exact same conversation. Maybe there's a sweet spot for the length of a tweet in any given language that we could find out by map-reducing some big data. But it's unlikely to coincide with the arbitrary limit imposed by SMS, so I'm happy to see Twitter experimenting with a different limit and carefully monitoring how it affects usage patterns.