From the get-go, messaging-app Twitter was designed to let people share text messages over mobile phones rather than computers. Most phones can display only a limited amount of characters, so Twitter’s designers restricted its messages length to meet those limits.
When Twitter was born in 2006, it was designed to be used via wireless carriers’ text-messaging services. They were (and are) limited to 160 characters. So Twitter’s creators reserved 20 characters for a user name, leaving 140 characters for the post–not yet known as a “tweet”–itself.
At the time, it was a straightforward accommodation of a technical restriction. But the 140-character limit soon became the single most famous thing about the service. A decade later, it remains a daily fact of life for anyone who ever runs out of characters before concluding a tweet.
Picture Credit : Google