This taken for SocialTimes By Lauren Dugan on Nov. 11, 2011 – 5:00 PM
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.
This taken for SocialTimes By Lauren Dugan on Nov. 11, 2011 – 5:00 PM
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.