Did I post this already? I don’t think I did. Hopefully not.
Why are Twitter messages 140 characters?
Because they were designed to fit into the 160 characters of a text message, with some characters filled up with header information and so on.
So why are text messages 160 characters?
Because they fit into 140 bytes, or 160 7-bit characters.
That, in turn, was so the messages could fit into unused space within the signalling formats used by phone networks.
- How Twitter was born
- The Wikipedia entry on SMS for lots of geeky stuff about its origins.
- Telstra brochure from 1997 explains new-fangled “text messages”
7 replies on “Why are Twitter messages 140 characters?”
Which leads, in turn, to the next question: Why are SMS messages 27.5 cents each (or $2 million per gigabyte) if they’re just sent in a bit of unused transmission space? Surely the mechanism for farming messages out to the correct recipients can’t cost that much to run.
@Philip – One word: Profit.
reminds me of the (completely debunked) story of why NASA rockets are the dimension they are because of the width of a chariot – http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp
I don’t think you posted this before.
Wouldn’t a better explanation be that Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters, because 140 **8-bit** characters take up 140 bytes??
@Philip: I will never understand people who still use SMS for that very reason. The cheapest SMS rate floating around (that I know of) is LiveConnected, whose text message rate is $0.006 (assuming you use up all $500 of the “M” cap (i.e. send 2000 texts in a month), which costs $11.99 a month), which would equate to $42,857 per GB. That’s assuming all of your text messages are filled with 160 characters (that being the “best case scenario”).
Yet 1GB of mobile data these days barely costs $10. And with smartphones having apps which let you send messages through the data network, I fail to see why there are still smartphone users using SMS (to contact other smartphone users).
Interesting facts, but it’s still annoying! I like to ramble when using Social Media.
@Ronnie Maybe because there are instances where the message can be delayed due to server issues (Apple’s iMessage is horrible)