Hacker News Reader

It might seem like Twitter's length limit is due to SMS but it's actually not.

Twitter's limit is 140 Unicode characters, which is subtly different from SMS's limit of 140 bytes (160 7-bit characters or 70 UTF-16 characters).

View on HN

I was under the impression that they reserved 20 7-bit characters for usernames in @replies, which would suggest that it is still limited due to SMS, no?

Yeah, but tweets aren't limited to the GSM 7-bit character set, so if you tweet in say, Russian, 140 characters is too much, because the whole message needs to be encoded using 2-byte characters.

Twitter's limitation is based on thinking around SMS, but it doesn't actually match up to real world SMS, because they didn't think through all the international language considerations. It's pretty botched up.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=660986

Ah, got it. Thank you, that was helpful.

I think that whatever the original reason to limit tweets to 140 characters, it's become such a part of their identity that it would be foolish to change it...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com