140 Characters: Enough

Short Is Sweet: Postcards Begat SMS Begat Twitter TechCrunch You simply cannot go over 140 characters. And more often than you may imagine, that’s enough. ....... they looked at postcards and found that most of those had messages of 150 characters or less. ..... I never thought of the limitation in a negative sense, but rather as something that could inspire creativity in messages. And could even spur communication. ..... With a 140 character limit, a correlation between briefness and rudeness doesn’t exist. ..... It’s a limitation that is liberating.

Tweets are building blocks to many things. 140 characters are quite enough to say something to someone in conversation mode. You say then you listen. But the real magic of tweets is that you can insert a shortened URL into those 140 characters. That is what has been the game changer. That is what led to the concept of real time search. If a tree fell in the forest, but noone was there to witness, did the tree actually fall? Tweets have challenged massive data centers on Google property. Twitter is saying they don't need to index the websites. They just need to see what sites and pages people are visiting at any one point in time.

Twitter has nowhere close to attained critical mass, but it is only a matter of time before it does. So, yes, postcards are cool, SMS is handy, and Twitter is all the rage.

I know of people who don't blog no more, they tweet. They check email less often, they tweet. There are people who don't do RSS no more, they tweet. Twitter is where they place their bookmarks.

Atoms are building blocks. They, by definition, are small. Tweets are building blocks.

I think there is an underlying logic to the 140 characters limit we have not pinned down yet.