Jack Dorsey
As with so many of the technologies that are now part of our digital furniture, one of Twitter 's most famous features - the 140 character limit - was incidental and almost accidental.

Its co-founder, Jack Dorsey once explained that "the particular constrain of 140 characters was kind of borrowed."

Basic phones allowed 160 characters for their "short message service" (SMS), "so we took 20 characters for the user name and left 140 for the content. That's where it's all came from."

In the age of digital verbal diarrhea, this limit has taken on a significance beyond the merely technical.

It forces us to be terse and economical with language - to force our meaningful thought, quote, an update or criticism into a length that an audience bombarded by information from a dizzying array of sources may just find the time to read.

For many, this is Twitter's main edge, the reason that it fits within a crowded ecosystem of platforms jostling for space and where Facebook is increasingly king.

But it may have been a fateful commercial decision for Twitter too. As it went global, Twitter looked for users outside of the United States and, crucially, outside of the English-speaking world.

Suddenly, the 140 character limit took on a new, probably unforeseen but increasingly important significance. In some languages 140 characters is half an essay, whilst in others it's barely enough to clear your throat.

The same quote through (and with apologies to those who can actually speak other languages) passed through Google translate, in the character-hungry German tongue, is:

Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeutet, die Grenzen meiner Welt.

That is a whopping 60 characters.

Yet in Japanese, where you get the sense that each character is working a bit harder, it is:


That's 21 characters, just a third of the length.

Twitter, like all social media platforms, is dependent on the growth and loyalty of its digital flock. We are the audience they sell access to, we produce the mountains of valuable data that they use.

The calculation is simple: the more people that use the platform, the more money social media platforms make, and will eventually make when people work out how to do so.

Here, Twitter's growth looks like it is slowing down . Earlier this year it revealed its growth was (only) up 15 per cent from the last year. Below what investors expected, this caused Twitter's share price to wobble, and its CEO, Dick Costolo, to depart.

The 140 character limit may be part of their problem. Only four million Germans have an account, compared to 15 million users in the UK, and it has trailed behind other social media platforms.

In Japan, Twitter's prospects look completely different. 26 million people use Twitter there, a fifth of their total population and half of people who use any kind of social media.

This is more than Facebook, and is set to grow even more in the years ahead.

Social media platforms are still locked into a Darwinian process of crazily rapid growth and adaption.

Those that do will survive, and those that do not will fall away, or be consumed and assimilated by their hungry rivals.

MySpace stands as the biggest warning to all: once the largest and most valuable social media platform in the world, they now manage 5 per cent of the regular users that Facebook recently attracted in just one day.

Jack Dorsey is now back at Twitter's helm. As he tries to navigate Twitter through the stormy seas ahead, he'll be scratching his head at the decision he made a decade ago. 140 characters perhaps once seemed to be such a clean and obvious technical fix, but has now been wrapped up in the messy world of language and culture.

The quote above was from Ludwig Wittgenstein: "the limits of my language means the limits of my world". For Twitter, that much is now all too clear.

This article was written by Carl Miller Research Director, Centre for the Analysis of Social Media and demos from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.