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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

> Any magic reason for the 140 char limit is pretty much gone now.

This is incredibly short-sighted. I, for one, still only use Twitter via text. If Twitter allowed for longer messages, I'd be out, as would many of the people that I know.

The plural of anecdote is not data, but just becasue everyone you know uses an app, does not mean that everyone does. I'm sure txt is still _really important_ to Twitter overall.

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Does your phone and provider not support long SMS messages? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenated_SMS ).

I couldn't find a list of providers that support CSMS. That certainly kills any need to limit things to 140.

Sprint doesn't, verizon supports slightly longer then normal text but I don't know if it's CSMS.

All the UK providers seem to, and I haven't seen a phone that doesn't since about 2000.

I have no idea. My phone probably doesn't support them, though. It's pretty terrible. Free is better than paying, unfortunatly.

My nokia 8310 that had in 2001/2 supported it so maybe your phone does

Verizon's phones are notoriously crippled. I'd expect Nokia to have thier act together, though.

That was here in the U.K. I think all networks do and have supported it here for a long time.

If txt was _really important_ to Twitter they'd have actually got the length limits right: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=660986

Summary: for languages like Arabic, Hindi, etc., you only get 70 characters total.

Considering they're an American company, I'm not really suprised. Unfortunate, but not suprising.

Sure, but what about a separate field for a URL attached to a message? Do you _have_ to have the URL in the message?

A lot of times, I'll see a bit.ly link and type it in by hand.

from what i remember, twitter used to allow >140 character message updates through their website, and just truncated them to 140 when sending them to sms users.

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