Well, yeah, but for the obvious reason - tweets are meant to be short and consumed in large numbers, but aren't generally meaty enough for a discussion, while some people are using Google+ as essentially a blogging platform. 140 (or 256) characters is rarely enough for an entire HN discussion, but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy reading dozens of tweets at a time to get a sense of what's going on.
Actually, many of those tweets have links, so in some sense Twitter competes with HN as a link aggregator, not with Google+ as a primary source.
Comprehending why the Twitter limit exists should let you comprehend why there's no point for App.net to follow it.
The service won't actually be used for "micro-blogging" unless users are constrained by some limit, but 144 is too damn small. Nobody would ever have picked it if they weren't forced to, and these days they aren't.
What infinitesimal fraction of modern Twitter users in App.net's target market do you imagine use the service via SMS? The limit a legacy of an irrelevant use case.
I'd probably have gone a bit higher than 256 myself (disregarding attachment to powers of two), but it's an improvement.
> The service won't actually be used for "micro-blogging" unless users are constrained by some limit, but 144 is too damn small.
The funny thing is that in languages like Japanese and Chinese, where one "character" contains a lot more info than one Latin letter, Twitter is used in quite a different way.
I've been using Tent (https://tent.io) which also adopted 256 characters, and I think it's actually quite generous for statuses. Maybe too much; the nature of microblogging changes when you don't have to be concise. I bet the sweet spot is probably somewhere in 160-200.
Sticking to 140 would be a good standard for a microblogging standard since it would allow you to syndicate out to Twitter and you could emulate the API and automatically have other apps support that character limit.
If you go beyond 140 it is then no longer a microblog post, but rather just an ordinary blog post.
I'm not sure how many Twitter users actually use SMS any more. I tried to use it to send in an update a few weeks ago and it took ~4 hours for the tweet to appear in my timeline. I'm in the UK so maybe they have better response times in other countries.
