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I have never used Twitter so I might be mistaken but I believe the limit has been 280 for a while now, which is why the first one at 269 bytes would also have f
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
I have never used Twitter so I might be mistaken but I believe the limit has been 280 for a while now, which is why the first one at 269 bytes would also have fit.
- jsheard 2y agoYeah it was changed to 280 for all users in 2017. That's still the default limit, but paying users can exceed it now.
- GrumpyNl 2y agoTwitter was based on sms, the standard SMS character limit is 160. They used 140 so they could use the remained 20 chars for other purposes.
- acuozzo 2y ago140 and 160 are related when it comes to SMS. The GSM-7 alphabet is the most common one in use with SMS (or, at least, it was as UCS-2 is more common now with emojis and such). 160 is the number of GSM-7 characters. 160*7/8 = 140 which is the number of bytes in the userdata portion of the TPDU.
- pests 2y agoI don't think the Twitter choice of 140 was anything to do with this though and is just a coincidence. Back during dumbphones the only way to receive tweets while mobile was via the texting interface, and it would want to prepend the username. I don't think reserving 20 for the username has anything to do with how many bits are used to represent the alphabet.
- kragen 2y agoThat's coincidence, though. I used Twitter to keep in touch with friends via SMS in 02008, and the messages had space for a prelude to say who they were from. In the opposite direction, you could use that space to tell Twitter to send the message privately to someone.
- benatkin 2y agoThe username length restriction might come partly from that. They could surely relax it by now, though. I saw it at play this week when @SecondGentleman (15 characters) changed to @SecondGent46.