Giving you more characters

Re:Giving you more characters by bogomipz on Wednesday September 27, 2017 @12:16AM (#15344878)

>"Yeah, this reasoning especially also struck me as weird, because Twitter's 140 character limit was chosen from an English-speaking viewpoint."

I don't believe this is correct but rather 140 characters limit was chosen because SMS will break a message greater than 160 characters into two messages. 140 characters leaves 20 characters for a username.

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Re:Giving you more characters by e12e on Wednesday September 27, 2017 @12:49AM (#15345009)

Well, it's correct in that 160 characters was chosen from a German (I presume, possibly English/"European") viewpoint, for sms...:

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

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Re:Giving you more characters by bogomipz on Wednesday September 27, 2017 @01:20AM (#15345104)

I've heard this story before and I think it might be apocryphal. Usually that same LA Times piece is cited as well.

More likely is that 160 characters was what the GSM signaling channel comfortably allowed, essentially making it free.

Its still this way today - SMS uses an out of band signaling channel and cell phone companies charge you as data.

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Re:Giving you more characters by mads on Wednesday September 27, 2017 @02:30PM (#15350809)

140 characters is an 8 bit SMS message. 160 characters is a 7 bit SMS message.

You can also send a UCS2 encoded SMS, which can contain 70 characters.

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