Why are Twitter messages 140 characters?

Tue 21 August 2012 7:20am by
Filed under: Net 

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.

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Comments

7 comments on Why are Twitter messages 140 characters?

  1. Philip on Tue, 21st Aug 2012 12:23 pm

    2. 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.

  2. Julian Wearne on Tue, 21st Aug 2012 3:15 pm

    3. @Philip – One word: Profit.

  3. malcolm on Tue, 21st Aug 2012 4:20 pm

    4. 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

  4. enno on Tue, 21st Aug 2012 4:36 pm

    5. I don’t think you posted this before.

  5. Ronnie on Tue, 21st Aug 2012 6:55 pm

    6. 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).

  6. jarks on Wed, 22nd Aug 2012 9:00 am

    7. Interesting facts, but it’s still annoying! I like to ramble when using Social Media.

  7. Leslie on Wed, 22nd Aug 2012 7:53 pm

    8. @Ronnie Maybe because there are instances where the message can be delayed due to server issues (Apple’s iMessage is horrible)

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