The character limit is not the bottleneck. Twitter-like services aren't good at conversation because of the latency. Everyone here has experienced chat/IM. The

The character limit is not the bottleneck. Twitter-like services aren't good at conversation because of the latency. Everyone here has experienced chat/IM. The reason you can have an actual conversation there is that it's rapid-fire. That's why we've focused on reducing the latency for ShopTalk. Even using HTTP and comet, we've been able to give it a real interactive, rapid-fire feel. Chat isn't as sexy as newer trends like microblogging, but it's far more useful.