Dear Twitter- Don’t Change the 140 Character Limit – Lance Ulanoff – PCMag.com
For: “The 140-character limit now feels less like a feature than a big, obvious bug.”
Against: “Twitter was never intended as a conversation hub. Yes, it’s for sharing, some engagement, but is, necessarily, a broadcast and share medium. Longer posts, even the 280 characters he suggests, would undercut that intention.”
Mind you, there’s no technical reason for staying with 140 characters, not even to be backwards compatible with SMS (most, if not all, carriers support concatenated SMSs), so it’s rather a matter of staying with the “brief is sweet” philosophy, and possibly because it takes a bit more space, but consider that a single uploaded picture on Facebook can easily take a 1000 times more space. Then we have the videos…
Twitter doesn’t store any media except for the user icons and custom backgrounds, so the storage space needed by Twitter is linearly proportional to the amount of tweets, and each tweet together with meta data should take about 500 bytes as a database row, including indexing.