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Comment by Nadya | Hacker News Reader

They got rid of the SMS-related limitations ages ago, but kept the 140 limit because it was "part of what makes Twitter - Twitter".

It's also why Twitter is really popular in Japan. 140 characters is more than enough to hold actual conversations (even if most statements/responses are typically 12-20 characters and the rest of the space is used for emoji)

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I think Twitter's popularity in Japan, despite the fact that 140 characters there can convey a message that's 3-4x larger than in English, is indicative that increasing the English character count to somewhere between 280-560 (or much better, moving to word counts instead) would not be the death sentence for the service that many make it out to be.

Youalsoneedtointroducemaxwordlengthinthatcase.

How would that work for non-spaced languages?

Which one might call a "natural experiment" for how increasing the limit would affect English speakers' use of the service. (But I don't think Twitter will do it - the number 140 is so well known, it's basically part of its identity.)

FYI as has been posted to hn earlier wrt why sms were 160 characters, which lead to 140 character tweets w/20 characters reserved for user names:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-...

It's rather interesting that the 160 character limit isn't arbitrary - but also doesn't account for eg: URLs in text.

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