Recently, I’ve noticed
something. If you send me an email, the likelihood that I’m going to
respond is pretty small. But if you send me a message on Twitter, the
likelihood that I’ll respond is much higher. Certainly, part of it is
that I get fewer messages on Twitter. But you might be surprised at how close
it’s getting in volume when you add @replies to direct messages. The
bigger factor for me, is the length of the messages.

If I open up an email and see it
filled with paragraphs of information, guaranteed my eyes are going to glaze
over. Certainly sometimes it’s an important message that I do need to
read, but most of the time it’s just a core message filled with paragraphs
of bloat. I don’t want or need the bloat, I need the core message. And
that’s why I love Twitter. You simply cannot go over 140 characters. And
more often than you may imagine, that’s enough.

Now, on the face of it, plenty of
people will disagree with me on that point. But think about it. In an age where
we’re bombarded by tons of information, from multiple angles, all day
long, there is something beautiful about brevity.

I used to read screenplays for a
living. Trust me when I say that there is no shortage of people who can blather
on about something to seemingly no end. But the skill in writing a screenplay
often came down to if you could convey what you needed to convey in just a few
lines. It’s not an easy thing to do — at all. And while it’s
not quite the same because it’s even more compact, Twitter forces you do
to a similar thing in its own way. And Twitter is hardly the only form of
communication that has done this.

Most users know by now that the
140 character limit of Twitter is actually tied to the limits of text
messaging. Text messages can only be 160 characters long (Twitter needed to
reserve the extra 20 characters for usernames). But do you know where the 160
character limit comes from?

The LA Times ran an excellent piece
a few months ago about Friedhelm Hillebrand, the father of the modern text
message. He dreamed up the 160 character limit while working at a typewriter in
the mid-1980s, trying to see how long sentences needed to be to convey
something. He found 160 characters was the magic number he kept arriving at.
But the deciding committee for SMS still wasn’t sure until they looked at
postcards and found that most of those had messages of 150 characters or less.

And so you see, while you may
think Twitter’s character limit is silly or frustrating, it’s
actually born out of two other forms of communication that are widely accepted
and used the world over. You may not think of Twitter being just like a
postcard, but in some ways it is — one that you can instantaneously send
to many friends or acquaintances at the same time. And minus the cost of a
stamp.

Even with the rise of technology,
the lure of the short message remains. And that was the key reason why I found
Twitter compelling when I
first started using it over two
years ago. 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.

It’s liberating to know
that you only have 140 characters or less to respond to something. For a lot of
messages, that removes a huge burden of trying to say enough to the person
you’re talking to so that they don’t think you’re being rude.
With a 140 character limit, a correlation between briefness and rudeness
doesn’t exist.

And that’s why more and
more I’m finding myself telling people, “Just message me on
Twitter.” It’s a two-way street. I don’t want to have to read
you go on and on about something that could be said in one line, and you
won’t have to listen to me go on and on about something in response.
Again, it won’t work for all messages, which is why Twitter or something
like it will never kill email, but for a lot of messages, it works just fine.

Characters and time are saved. It’s a limitation that is
liberating.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/04/short-is-sweet-postcards-begat-sms-begat-twitter/span