I’ve joined Twitter in September 08 in a bid to promote my tech blog and drive more readers from the micro-blogging platform. Gradually, besides posting links related to my blog, I even post updates related to my school and personal life. Surprisingly, my Twitter follower count has been increasing significantly of about 100-600 followers daily. Why I mananged to attract the eyes of many users is because my tweets seems interesting to them as I frequently talk stuff from a teenager’s perspective. Also, there aren’t many kids using the social platform, hence resulting in a spike of the number of followers especially those who are in my age group.
It’s known that Twitter settled on the 140 characters limit as the folks there wanted to implement a SMS support for the social networking website when it was first launched in 2006. Hence, the team decided to place a limit on the number of characters that would go out via SMS for each post. Not only that, they have to take into consideration of the username and colon in front of the message.
Some may complain that 140 characters are insufficient whereas the rest say that the limit is just nice. In my opinion, since Twitter’s focus is being a micro-blogging service, therefore each status posted by users shouldn’t contains too much words or else it’ll defeats its purpose. I like it in 140 characters is because people would just want to know what you’re doing currently and not in detail (this can be written in personal blogs). Also, if tweets are too wordy, imagining tweets written in a paragraph, the timeline will be flooded with text and therefore people would rather use personal blogs as a way to write one’s thoughts towards a particular subject.
Actually, Twitter was once a platform for users to tell their friends around the world what they are doing and their opinions. However, due to some influence by some Twitterers, it has turned from a micro-blogging platform to a news sharing website. Although, a huge majority of users still posts their personal life but now people share links, especially news. Hence, Twitter has been dubbed “as the best place to read the latest news online”.