Things You Didn’t Know About Twitter

The 140-character limit is no accident

Twitter's limit on characters per tweet isn't arbitrary. In 1985, as part of his work for the Global System for Mobile Communications, engineer Friedhelm Hillebrand reportedly typed out random sentences and blurbs on a piece of paper and calculated that they were generally fewer than 160 characters. His team then used that as the standard length for texts.

Twitter didn't invent the #hashtag

Use of the hashtag (#) to categorize content dates back to 1988 and users communicating on Internet Relay Chat clients (IRC), which were like old-school chatrooms. It wasn't until 2007 that bloggers first suggested hashtags as a way to group tweets, and the idea quickly caught on.

It's possible (though difficul) to tweet anonymously

That's because each tweet is packed with metadata that shows your name, an identifier that's unique to your account, where the tweet came from, what time it was tweeted, and more. To truly go anonymous, you'd have tocreate a separate account through a proxy internet connection, mask your IP address, switch off Twitter's geolocation feature, and other tricky stuff.