Obama Admits That He’s Never Used Twitter, Thinks The Chinese Should Be Able To
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It's the idea that "he" was using Twitter, among other services (like an iPhone app..), as a tool to promote his presidential campaign very heavily towards certain demographics. Something that appealed to a lot of younger voters who believed then that he seemed to be very in-touch with that group as a result. Not to mention it wasn't the very idea of having a Twitter account for Obama (or any other politician) that was interesting, but that it appeared to be Obama himself writing the tweets, not someone else on his team.
Anyone who thought that Obama was personally authoring his Twitter feed is a little naive, IMHO.
I know plenty of other politicians and public figures have ghostwritten Twitter accounts. I was rather bummed to find out that the Mayor of LA had one ghostwritten while his office initially acted like he was either writing them himself or giving direct approval to tweets not written by him (and even a little drama over that whole incident).
Even though this sounds like it could have been invented by politicians I feel some relief that Obama does not waste his time on tweeting things like "Humbled".
So while I see some tweets in Korean that are similar to ones in English where the message is short and to the point, they're side by side with those paragraph-like tweets that break how I read twitter because they're addressing something more deeply than would be possible in one tweet in English. I can only speculate this 140-character difference both ways also causes differences in use with other languages.
This is half of the first paragraph of the simplified Chinese entry for the United States in Wikipedia. I cheated a bit to bring it under length: the 英文 portion actually spelled out United States of America. It clocks in at about 138 characters.
A rough translation from someone who is not literate in Chinese just to show you the information density:
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The United States of America (English: USA), referred to commonly as the United States, formerly known as the United States [editor's note: anachronistic Chinese 花旗國 rather than 美國], consist of 50 states and one federal district, forming a constitutionally established federal republic. The United States is located in the center of North America, bounded on the east by the Atlantic Ocean and in the west by the Pacific Ocean, on the north by Canada and the South by Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico. The capital is Washington, DC. It is comprised of Hawaii, Alaska, and the 48 contiguous states.
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[Edit: I was curious so I checked in Japanese, too, to substantiate my feeling that it would be at the midpoint between Chinese and English. Yep.
アメリカ合衆国（アメリカがっしゅうこく、英：United States of America）、通称アメリカまた合衆国（合州国）、米国（べいこく）は、北アメリカ大陸および北太平洋に位置する連邦共和国。 イギリスの北米植民地が1776年7月4日に独立を宣言して成立した国家である。
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The United States of America (insert pronunciation guide in Japanese here, English: United States of America), usually referred to as America, the United States (the US), or another way to say the US in Japanese is a federal republic located on the North American continent and in the north Pacific Ocean.
The United States of America was founded a nation when the North American colonies declared their independence from England on July 4th, 1776.]
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And, for the comparison to English, here is what fits in a Tweet:
The United States of America (commonly referred to as the United States, the U.S., the USA, or America) is a federal constitutional republic
There wasn't enough space for the period.
(But of course, it really depends on the nature of the text.)
[1] http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002379.h... [2] http://blogamundo.net/lab/wordlengths/
English clocks in at about 5 bits per character, so 140 characters is about 700 bits of data. The unicode representation of the Chinese text above is 378 bytes, and it can be compressed only a little bit (about 20%).
'Number of characters' is not a very good way to measure information density I think, especially not when 'character' is something that is variable length.