Over the weekend I was cleaning out an old desk, and ran across several dozen postcards. Picture postcards. (For you youngsters out there who may not know what a postcard is, ask your grandfather.) I flipped them over and read a few of them, fondly remembering when I might have gotten them, and how I felt when I found it in my mailbox.
A nice jaunt down memory lane. And then it hit me…every one of the cards had a message that was FEWER than 140 characters long. Typically a very simple message, “Having a wonderful time, wish you were here,” or “Our room is in the far left corner of the hotel…great view from here!”
Post cards have been used for decades for short personal greetings and messages, as well as for advertising and coupon distribution. Perhaps the post card could be considered the first Tweet.
Wikipedia confirms the first USPS postal cards were sold in 1873…135 years before Twitter hit the web last year. And yet I would venture a guess that there are thousands of times more tweets sent today than post cards. We can send personal messages and greetings, photos of what where we are and what we are doing, links to articles and web content, and coupons and special offers.
But wait…there was email before Twitter. Yes, but I consider email closer to the LETTER than the post card. Think about the emails you receive. It’s a rare occurrence when it is less than 140 characters, isn’t it? Speaking personally, I am much more current with reviewing my Twitter account than my email. Short and sweet allows me to quickly peruse Twitter, where email is not as efficient (although with the sender and the subject line, along with the Outlook tools, I can easily separate the important emails from the less important ones at a glance.) It’s the length of the messages that is often the barrier.
There is something beautiful about brevity. Like a short story, it is much harder to structure the arc of your message with a restriction on length. It requires a talent at word-smithing. It requires focus.
Most users know by now that the 140 character limit of Twitter is actually tied to the limits of text messaging. Text messages can only be 160 characters long (Twitter needed to reserve the extra 20 characters for usernames). But do you know where the 160 character limit comes from? The LA Times ran an excellent piece a few months ago about Friedhelm Hillebrand, the father of the modern text message. He dreamed up the 160 character limit while working at a typewriter in the mid-1980s, trying to see how long sentences needed to be to convey something. He found 160 characters was the magic number he kept arriving at. But the deciding committee for SMS still wasn’t sure until they looked at postcards and found that most of those had messages of 150 characters or less.
So with the rise of technology, the lure of the short and compact message remains. That’s why I guess I found Twitter so compelling when I first began using it. I didn’t think of the limitation as a negative, or a barrier, but as a challenge to inspire my “message creativity.”
And that’s why I like Twitter. And thus ends the lesson for today.
“There’s much to be said about not saying much.” --- Frank Tyger