9781422277324

Tech 2.0

Why 140?

T o provide you with the ultimate example of how much a user can express in a tweet, this is a sentence that contains exactly 140 characters. So how did the folks who cre- ated Twitter settle on the original 140 characters? Well, the foundation for Twitter was based in SMS—text messag- ing from cell phones. At the time, text messaging was limited to 160 characters. So the Twitter braintrust

decided that tweets would be no longer than 140 characters—which would allow up to 20 characters for the username that appears before the tweet. One of the advantages of Twitter was that users could send and re- ceive tweets through their phones—but they were delivered as text messag- es, and thus users were charged a fee for texting. If a tweet were more than 160 characters, it would be sent as multiple texts, so it would cost twice as much. This was long before the days where unlimited text messaging was common, so it was an important consideration. Over the years, Twitter users have come up with clever abbreviations to fit their messages within 140 characters. Of course, they’ve also taken to expressing thoughts in a series of related tweets, something that has come to be known as a “tweetstorm.” As explained on page 40, Twitter made the move to expand the limit to 280 in 2017.

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