3 ms·
The 140 character limit isn't just an arbitrary number to see how creative people can be within it. Many people forget or never knew that twitter started out wi
by ytjohn 12y ago
The 140 character limit isn't just an arbitrary number to see how creative people can be within it. Many people forget or never knew that twitter started out with its 140 character limit because of SMS limitations. SMS limits messages to 160 characters, and twitter reserves 20 of those. The final result of your message, including URLs has to fit within 140 characters to reach any SMS bound audience in a single message.
- function_seven 12y agoBut that's not the case now. The SMS limit is 160 7-byte characters, basically ASCII. But as parent noted, "They already let you tweet more than 140 bytes due to unicode so it's clearly not a technical reason such as a char(140) db column.". So why do they do it here?