© Merle Harton, Jr. | About | XML/RSS

Twitter Troubler

One can express a thought in 140 characters.¹ That's the success of Twitter, allowing writers to make every statement a poem. If you exceed [end.]

1.  The pedigree of the "tweet," as individual Twitter communications are called, has its hereditary link to the SMS (Short Message Service), otherwise known as the cell phone's text message. But the text message itself owes as much to the more nontechnical postcard. See "Why text messages are limited to 160 characters," Los Angeles Times, May 3, 2009: "To avoid the need for splitting cellular text messages into multiple parts, the creators of Twitter capped the length of a tweet at 140 characters, keeping the extra 20 for the user's unique address." Today the US Library of Congress announced that it will archive the entire body of tweets since 2006: "Library to acquire ENTIRE Twitter archive -- ALL public tweets, ever, since March 2006! Details to follow."