140 Characters Or Less

Twitter's limit of 140 characters can be good and bad. It forces us to get to the point in order to convey our message. On the other hand it can lead to unintended consequences when computers or humans shorten a longer message.
Two examples:
I captured this two months ago.

Just this morning, I ran across this:

At first glance, I thought it was referring to an organ-selling operation by way of my brain's highly trained tweet word extender function.  Then I checked the link. It is an opera not an operation. The non-Twitter headline is "Barrington native stars in an organ-selling opera". The tweet was only 74 characters so another 6 to add "stars " would have clarified it.

Flutter is proposing a 26 character limit. Watch the video here:

It's a joke, or is it? What if someone presented Twitter 3 years ago in a similar fashion? Would we have taken it seriously or thought it was a joke? Do we take it seriously today? How many if you have gone to your boss and said, "You need to Tweet."?

Who would have thought that Twitter would take off. But for a generation of texters accustomed to 140 characters or less, this is a way to share their thoughts with the world. The rest of us are just catching up.