The Rise of Twitter

The Guardian

TECHNOLOGY BLOG

Twitter: One hundred and forty characters to say nothing at all

In an age where at least 135000 people sign up to Twitter every day, we can no longer ignore this social media sensation. Character limits a 

Isaac Hampson

theguardian.com, Monday 14 October 2013 12:56 BST

A much needed button, sure to save us literally milliseconds of our lifespan. Image:  Fivetech.com

Imagine the scenario: You are a person using the internet, reading a blog post from the guardian when you spot that there is text missing from the fifth line in the article! Outraged by the laziness of the author and inflated by your feelings of superiority, you go to correct the mistake in the comments. Satisfied for the day, you go about reading the article and living your life. Little did you know, the author was just trying to make a point about the character limit on Twitter and now you look silly! If only you had been confined to 140 characters you would not have had space to complain about grammar... It seems Twitter is the solution to all our communication problems.

For those not in the 'techknow', Twitter is a blogging website with a twist. Any single post (or 'tweet') cannot exceed more than 140 characters. That's not 140 characters as played by an actor, that's a combination of 140 letters, word spaces and punctuation.

That's not a huge number. It's only about 20 words. For those who are overly verbose such as myself, it's simply not enough. Sure, I could incorporate 'TXT SPCH' into my tweets but I'd rather not take the time to translate to another language and defeat the whole point of the character limit.

Now, I don't feel as if I am really selling it right now. To many people (certainly to me at first) Twitter sounds like a giant time waster (and it is) to add to the likes of Facebook, Myspace (RIP) and... Twitter. Already it is synonymous with the biggest names in social network giants due to it's incredible success with the masses, despite being "a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal." (TIME MAGAZINE)

For many people the appeal of Twitter is the ability to functionally stalk everyone you follow, either celebrity or neighbor. You will be informed with bitesized little details such as "@LadyGaga lovin the new album huny keep at it xx #artpop #music" or "@SimonPegg why do u never reply 2 my tweets #2gd4fans #sellout". Such is the torture