TWITTER
Twitter Basics: Why 140-Characters, And How to Write More
We’re all used to the 140-character limit by now, but do you know how it started? Here’s a little history lesson for anyone wondering why they’ve got to condense their thoughts into 140-characters or less – and how to get around the limit without turning off your followers.
The origins of the 140-character limit
Once upon a time, long long ago… a group of young programmers whipped up a program that could send SMS to and from a small group of recipients.
This blossomed into Twitter, a web- and mobile- based messaging system that lets users send short messages – known as tweets – to one another.
So why the 140-character limit?
Twitter was (and still is) a service that relied heavily on mobile-messaging. Sure, you can send and receive tweets on your computer, but a huge draw of Twitter in the early days was its ability to be accessed from mobile phones.
And since the worldwide standard length of SMS (or text messages on phones) is 160-characters, the founders of Twitter thought it wise to stay within that bounds so as not to inundate people’s phones with 3 or 4 staggered, delayed, or even partially missing 4-part messages.
140-characters was chosen as a good length, leaving 20 characters for the username of the sender. This way, anyone receiving a tweet via SMS would get the whole tweet in a single text message, with nothing spilling over into a second or third message that pops up minutes later.
> What was its purpose and why is it long past it?
To allow people to use Twitter over SMS. SMS are 160 characters, so a 140 character tweet leaves room for a 20 character header to allow for metadata and actions.
You can still use Twitter this way, which is why (as of relatively recently) you couldn't post a tweet that began with the word "Get", even from the web interface.
SMS has a 160 character limit, and Twitter was originally supposed to be SMS driven. I personally don't know anyone who has ever Tweeted via SMS though, or whether that is still even possible.
I used it on an old Moto Razr for a while back in college when that was my daily driver. Address is still in my phone copied from SIM to SIM to Cloud (shortcode 40404).
On an old iPhone with just basic speech to text abilities I would sometimes use Bluetooth to "text twitter ..." and that worked. (Nowadays we got our Siris and Cortanas and direct app integration, but that "text twitter" is still sometimes a more reliable voice trigger than "tweet".)
I still often turn on SMS notifications for accounts I want to specifically hear from or events I'm attending.
What was its purpose and why is it long past it?