Why does Weibo limit 140 words

Applied for so many microblogging, number of applications http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/11113.html "> NetEase Weibo motivation is the most impure, because its word limit is not the legendary 140 words, but 163 words." I felt very cute, so I registered, and never logged in. Today in Renren forwarding status, prompted me more than 140 words, suddenly curious about what everyone is busy, why, in addition to NetEase Weibo, are limited by 140 words?

Of course, there have been explanations for this issue, such as the "No Twitter communication" expert on the daily, or the Sina Weibo deputy editor (originally Sina Weibo is edited AH), there are a variety of forums, Baidu know questions and so on, are not enough to convince people, textual addiction has not been satisfied, I had to do some textual criticism.

We Keep it short and sweet! It also ethically so happens this 140 characters is the perfect of length for sending status updates via text message. The standard text message length in most places is 160 characters/per. We Reserve characters for arranges's names, and the other 140 are all yours! (via Twitter FAQ)

In other words, Twitter wants Weibo to be "micro" first, concise, and then the limit is to take into account the number of SMS update status limit, itself is 160 letter limit, leaving 20 words to ID length, the remaining 140 letters left to users to play.

In addition, Yahoo! meme (2,000 words) and Google's Buzz (No limit) and so on the words have no short and fine requirements, on this level, is not on the micro-blog, can only be counted as lightweight blogs, no comparison.

If according to 160 words is short message length limit, then the domestic text message is 70 words, why the domestic micro-blog is not limited to 70 words, but 140 words? * The deputy chief of the Wave, said, because this is just two short message length. Seems reasonable explanation, but still can't help asking, why must two? Would it be like the "T." that starts with all the domestic microblogging addresses in the legend. On behalf of Twitter, is that a "reference" to Twitter? Or is this 140 a hidden industry standard that Twitter has set up? Chinese word limit from the already dead "eat" (update: It has been resurrected) "began to use the 140 words so far, become an unwritten rule, nothing special does not need to change, but netease in this point walked a klacka."

Of course, I have not only a tangled up this issue, this article on the Chinese Micro-blog 140 word analysis of the reason may be "on the one hand, 70 characters are really less load, on the other hand, in the input of Chinese, we will enter the English language." Although I am more certain of his starting point, but can not help but more serious: first, 70 characters are not enough information to carry? A rough calculation, according to the Xinhua translation Agency's years of translation experience, the number of words in English translation is about 1:1.8 (English:), and statistics show that the average English words 4.5 letters per word. So the 140-letter expression means that it can be translated into (140/4.5*1.8=) 56 Chinese characters. If viewed from this perspective, 70 Chinese characters are really enough to express a simple semantics (so many Chinese Twitter users have found that 140 Chinese characters can express more than 140 letters, a sense of superiority arises). Second, on the domestic micro-blog input in English this point has a very interesting finding: if the number of words in the country set to 70 words, then the English update is indeed a difficult problem. But the originality of Sina Weibo is that two English characters (letters, spaces, numbers, English symbols, etc.) are counted as a word, which allows the user to enter 280 English characters. This is pioneering, it seems that Sina Weibo is really allow users to send two times the number of Twitter information (included in Chinese and English), for unknown reasons.

It is this classmate's textual criticism line and I go to the same (I read his article just remember to come to school is from the limit of 70 words to 140 words), however, we do not have any conclusive evidence of the Chinese character 140 word, I am not an expert in any respect, and did not do how many words to meet the needs of micro-BO survey, All these are irresponsible speculations, look forward to the people in the line.

(Logo in decisive cut "beta" three words, to congratulate the domestic micro-blog "two times beta")

Chinese text message The word limit is 70 words, originally did not think why should control in this word, by Twitter explanation to get curious, so continue to textual criticism.

First tell a story: 1985 Bonn, Germany, Friedhelm Hillebrand sitting in his home, flip-flop tapping on the typewriter keyboard, randomly playing some sentences. The communications expert, while counting the number of letters, numbers, punctuation, and spaces, finally found that 160 characters were enough to show a simple meaning. Hellebrand was participating in a standard-setting program that allowed mobile phones to send and display text messages, taking into account the bandwidth limitations of wireless networks, the shorter the message the better. In the end, Hillebrand insists that 160 words are the best length limit, and that the length of text messages is limited.

As for the 160-word limit, this article in the Los Angeles Times explains in great detail (the story is taken from the previous part of the article) and has a very good translation at home, which can be found on its own in Google, where Twitter's founders may still be playing with mud.

And my most trusted Wikipedia great God mentioned in the SMS entry, "it was necessary to limit" the length of the messages to 128 bytes (later improved to 140 bytes, or 160 7-bit characters), so this messages could fit into the existing signaling. "In other words, 160 characters actually come from a 140-byte limit, 140 bytes equals (140*8/7=) 160 7-bit characters (140 8-bit characters, 70 16-bit characters, such as kanji). The Hillebrand typewriter experiment and the statistics on the number of postcards (generally no more than 150 letters) Verify that 160 characters are capable of simple semantic expression.

Then I saw the good news, said mobile phone message for the first time expansion in 20 years, telecom to support 150 words of text messages, do not know the basis and significance, the 09 news that "the year can provide services for users", now more than half of 2010, in addition to the 09 of the old news, also found no expansion of the news, It seems that the project has been postponed a lot.

Textual criticism.

Source: http://www.starming.com