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Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

Okay, okay, this may "amuse" hackers but is it interesting? The reason I found it provocative is that it reminds me of a huge challenge we face when introducing new ideas outside of the startup echo chamber.

Even something that seems obvious like email at one time seemed mysterious. Why would anyone besides a nerd have wanted it in 1985? It was feature-poor compared to paper and most people had never heard of it. If few of your friends and business contacts had email, why would you want it?

What are we inventing today? And how will we explain it to the rest of the world?

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This link is only interesting when coupled with your comment. I clicked the comments link with a head full of steam, itching to justify flagging the post due to lack of content or some other such excuse.

The almost-a-cliche-easy example is Twitter: I have never been able to explain Twitter sufficiently to those who do not follow web tech closely. Suddenly, Oprah is banging out tweets in capital letters, and Shaq is correcting her 'netiquette. What happened?

I think the most frustrating part about grasping Twitter is it's character limit. People are perfectly happy to accept a character limit on text messages, but (like myself) can't fathom why anyone would be interested in Twitter with such a horrible limit like that. It's an interesting dichotomy.

Twitter is a sign that I am getting old, because I just don't get it at all, and I doubt I ever will. Oh well.

It is my opinion that the limit forces those who would be verbose to get to the point. It's nearly mandating conciseness. I tend to be very 'wordy', so I think it's a good thing for me (or, for those who would follow me). Far from horrible, it's actually a plus for Twitter, I think.

This quickly becomes apparent when you actually start following a substantial number of people: keeping up is difficult enough with the character limit. Without a limit, the verbal overload would make the service unusable. The terseness gives it a chance of keeping the information density high.

People don't care about the limit on text messages because the input method for most phones is slow, which forces them to be concise.

Twitter doesn't generally have the same input speed limitations, so an artificial limit serves to prevent information overload.

Of course, many smart phones have full keyboards now, and people are starting to use other things than SMS from their phones.

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