Why 140?

I caught an Austin American Statesman reprint of a Los Angeles Times story that finally explains why you can only Twitter messages of 140 characters or less.

The number defied any kind of readily identifiable reason behind it, to me. But this explanation by LA Times writer Mark Milian shows how researchers landed at 160 characters for cell phone texts.

Twitter creators took it one step further, Milian reports, by limiting messages to 140 characters and reserving the last 20 for the twitterer's address.

Read the story. It's interesting.