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Comment by coderdude | Hacker News Reader

It's been said one hundred million times, but the reason is for SMS.

That's just a tidbit thrown around to soothe those irked by the limit. It's been well over a decade since the last mobile phone was sold that couldn't handle long/concatenated SMS. The reality is that the 140 character limit is just an arbitrary one; one that makes Twitter, Twitter.

I still can't send text messages over 160 characters to anyone not on my carrier (Verizon) so I'm not sure where you're getting that figure from.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenated_SMS

Perhaps this is another anomaly that Americans have to put up with from their carriers — not being one I wouldn't know.

That could very well be. We're underprivileged when it comes to mobiles, unfortunately.

Just out of curiosity, do US carriers allow you to send inter-carrier MMS and can you transfer your phone number between carriers?

Yes, they let you send inter-carrier MMS and you can also transfer your number between carriers.

Anecdote is not the singular of data, but I have been able to send/receive long messages using Android and iPhone on AT&T.

Just yesterday I even noticed Android's core SMS app is even nice enough to tell you when the message is overflowing into a second SMS, so you know that you and the recipient will get billed for more than one SMS. Which brings me to another idea:

Perhaps the billing issue is more of a concern as well -- receiving concatenated messages certainly would cost more for (American) users not on unlimited SMS plans, and presumably would cost more for Twitter to send out through their gateway?

It is an excuse.

At most, they need to shorten the links only for SMS; they don't need to shorten them for the API or for the website (as they've just demonstrated).

I can click on links that come in via SMS on my Droid. Why kill that emerging functionality?

Edit: I completely read what you said incorrectly. My response must make no sense.

Next time, just delete the post.

That's not a defence, it's an excuse.

It's not a defense. It's a fact. My co-worker prefers to receive all tweets via SMS. They advertise the SMS feature at the top of every page. Calling people names at every turn isn't going to make your point more valid.

Last I saw something like 5% of users accessed twitter using SMS. Basing your limits on a very very very niche use case seems bizarre.

Realize we are all big time nerds with smartphones. Everyone else doesn't have one (yet?).

And when Twitter started out, even fewer of us had them.

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