I'm just curious to know why, years after the release of Twitter, it still has a 140 character limit? What's the purpose of this? Certainly even with billions of tweets a day it wouldn't cost that much to up that limit to 2,000 characters. Twitter has millions of dollars of ad-revenue and their decision to limit the expression of their users hardly seems like it is worth the compromise.
What other online services limit the expression of their users? And, what kind of users would seek out such a debilitating limitation?
I was recently considering making a social dating site, something like a OkCupid — would a 140 character profile be desirable? Has there ever been a successful non-Twitter analog to this? Perhaps an ancient childhood game where kids had to formulate paragraphs with no more than 1.5 sentences?
Could someone help me understand Twitter?
Best Answer
The reason is so that when tweets were sent via SMS, messages wouldn't be split. SMS messages are 160 characters and they wanted to leave 20 characters for the username.