I’d like to see just how horrible someone can make a site. Facebook is a good contender.
I thought Twitter was a stupid idea when it first started. 140 character limit? What the fuck is the point? The fact they increased that limit shows it was dumb. Everything else about the site just gives further reason to hate it.
That limit came from the days of SMS. The idea was that you can’t go to the internet, because data is expensive, the network doesn’t exist, your dumb phone can’t even open websites etc. However, you can send SMS messages, and those things have a 160 character limit.
Do does that mean they took an existing limitation from the SMS protocol, that didn’t apply because it used data instead and then shoehorned it into a godawful web 2.0 monstrosity all the same (and bear in mind, this is significantly reducing the unnecessary character limit!)
In 2006 the restriction did apply. The idea was that you would type the message on a computer, and let Twitter send a few SMS messages to a small group people.
You weren’t supposed to have millions of followers or write a full length blog post using a hundred short messages. The idea was that you cold reach people quickly even though they didn’t have access to a proper computer or the internet. So much has changed in the past 18 years…
