[buffington]

A bit of related trivia: Twitter was a service that only worked over SMS in the early days. The character limit was set at 140 since that was a length that could safely work with all carriers, as well as leave enough room for your Twitter handle.

The shortness of messages was also a perfect fit for what early users of Twitter were doing: answering the question of "What are you doing?"

There was a trend when Twitter began of adjusting your AIM "status" message to reflect what you were doing, or what music you were listening too (there were scripts that automated this for you).

As an early adopter of Twitter, I can recall that people started using it in similar ways. One of the first Twitter messages that I received in the early days was from @ev saying "Peeing."

I think it's fair to say things haven't changed much.