I think it was a beautiful "what if." What happens when we limit a message to 140 chars? The character of conversation changes - so do people's use patterns. The most wonderful thing about twitter is that you can't get lost down the rabbit hole of a three paragraph email. And there's pressure to reply quickly to stay part of the conversation.
What happens when you set a message limit of 140 characters is you end up with a database that is perfect for training computers about semantics.
It is a genius example of design thinking, I'll grant you, but twitter's priority as a business was to build a database for analysis and that was the design constraint which resulted in a 140 character limit to messages.
It is a communication platform, but only in as much as it fulfills its main purpose of generating datasets.
It's limited to 140 characters because it depended on SMS as a transport. The idea that the main purpose of this limit was for generating datasets presumes far more foresight than the Twitter founders deserve.
> twitter's priority as a business was to build a database for analysis and that was the design constraint which resulted in a 140 character limit to messages
This is the first time I hear about this. Do you have any source or did you make it up yourself?
Twitter's original function was group SMS messaging among friends, the 140 char limit was the 160 character SMS limit + an 18 character username.
