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If 140 is too little, what's the right number?

Tuesday, June 23, 2009 by Dave Winer.

Jonathan Edman tweets: "I deeply understand how crippling 140c is, but what is the right number? Don't you run into the same problem at almost any num?" 

Since my answer is too long to fit in 140 chars, I answered here. 

Jonathan, I don't know what the "right" number is, but I have some ideas. 

First, almost anything above 140 would be seen by power Twitter users as an improvement, and a cause for celebration. It would be a sign that someone is listening. And it would immediately give us relief. It's as if, in 1981, Apple found a way to give us 72K instead of 48K. There would be a burst of creativity like the Summer of Love.  

Now, here's what I would do first, to try to come up with the right number. 

Read the feeds of the NY Times, BBC, and a few other professional news sources for a few weeks, and count the characters in the <description> elements of each <item>. Average the number. Double it. That's what I would go with. 

The theory being, if professional writers can summarize a whole news article in, X characters, then the average person should be able to express an idea in 2X characters. 

In my new River of News, I cut the intros off at 280 chars, arbitrarily, and it seems to work pretty well. Previous versions included full posts, and that was a problem, because some sites, like OpenLeft, write whole books in their posts. I also strip out markup. I'm tired of all the huge pictures people are throwing into the river. I see it as a gimmick to try to get more attention. I say let their ideas compete with everyone else's on a level playing field.