Twitter: The Truth Behind Those 140 Characters
By Anna Johnson on April 29th, 2010It turns out that Twitter co-founders Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey were inspired by the 160 character limit on mobile SMS text messages. So why aren’t Twitter tweets 160 rather than 140 characters?
Because, according to Biz Stone (who was interviewed by Katie Couric recently), while they liked the idea of keeping messages to around 160 characters, the Twitter founders wanted to allow room for the author’s name as well as the message. So… they decided that a tweet could have the author’s name plus a message of up to 140 characters, which together would total about 160 characters.
Why base Twitter on SMS texting in the first place? When first conceiving the idea for Twitter, Jack, Biz and Evan liked the idea of enabling individuals to send brief updates to all their friends at once.
Like many notable technologies, Twitter has evolved WAY beyond the initial idea. Which is surely a sign of creating something truly impactful: when others take your idea, adapt it, build on it, and evolve it into something even you never imagined.
