SMS (160) v. Twitter (140)
Recently there was an article on where the 160 SMS limit came from:
Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper. As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters.
The article goes on to desribe how the 160 limit seemed so perfect that the SMS creators went as far as to cut out the space of allowed characters so they could squeese 160 characters out of what was previously limited (in design) to 128 characters.
This leaves me with a question then: if 160 is perfect for SMS (based on some investigation), then why isn’t it right for Twitter?
Why did twitter choose 140? My quick Google searches haven’t turned up anything. Did they just pick some number or did they do some sort of investigation/study?
I saw this in an interview. It’s so that they could fit in text messages.
path dependency…
room for username
Tim: I’m not sure about the username comment. Isn’t the username part of the 140?
roju: But text messages are 160. Did they expand the character set or something? How does that connect up with SMS? I know some regions have an 80 character SMS limit due to the character set so that doesn’t really jive for those regions.
The username is not part of the 140 characters, which is why they have to make it less than 160 to fit user + msg.
Today, I’ve wondered the same thing. I’m not sure if the above comments are making much sense to me.
Lets tweet to twitter… maybe they will respond?
~ LouieV