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mk · 4832 days ago · link · · parent · post: Anonymous “Twitter Alternative” being used by protesters
I think it's a mix of expectations of consumption and creation. It takes less than a minute to text a tweet, and it takes just a few seconds to consume one. If there wasn't a limit to tweet size (or if it was much larger), then on the creation side, what constitutes a quality tweet would be partially based on the length of the content. That would add another dimension that might put off a users incentive to tweet. For example, when tweets are 140 chars, tweeting "I had a great tuna melt and Joe's Deli" is perfectly reasonable. However, if the average tweet length was 10 sentences long, that sandwich tweet would seem less reasonable, and maybe considered 'a waste of a tweet'. On the consumption side, if tweet length is much longer, you don't know what you are getting into. It becomes an entirely different experience if someone can tweet "great sandwich at Joe's", and another person can ruminate on Nitche's ideas of the origins of self worth.
If 140 chars isn't a sweet spot for the medium, I think it's probably not too far from it. Interestingly, Twitter in Japan is a different experience as their character-based tweets an pack a lot more information. It would be interesting to look at the different uses between Twitter in the US and Japan for that reason. Actually, if you looked at tweets around the world and related usage to information density of the language, you might be able to extrapolate the perfect tweet character limit for a given language. Of course, none of this considers the architecture of SMS, which is the basis for this limitation.