[statictype]

I was going to say that the 140 character limit is what separates twitter from every other blog+rss feed combination - but now that I think about it, that's only partially true.

Twitter's appeal is that it is a blog+rss feed combination and is probably the only one of it's kind. The technologies existed as separate entities - you post your thoughts on your own page - you use a separate tool to read an aggregated list of other's thoughts. Twitter combined the two into a dead simple interface.

The 140 character limit - initially an artifact left over from the days when sms was the primary means of using it - is now more of a practicality issue.

You can't show a steady stream of other's thoughts if they all extend to multiple pages.