I have never used Twitter so I might be mistaken but I believe the limit has been 280 for a while now, which is why the first one at 269 bytes would also have fit.
The username length restriction might come partly from that. They could surely relax it by now, though. I saw it at play this week when @SecondGentleman (15 characters) changed to @SecondGent46.
Co-author of the post here — we had 280 characters in mind. :-)
I have never used Twitter so I might be mistaken but I believe the limit has been 280 for a while now, which is why the first one at 269 bytes would also have fit.
Twitter was based on sms, the standard SMS character limit is 160. They used 140 so they could use the remained 20 chars for other purposes.
140 and 160 are related when it comes to SMS.
The GSM-7 alphabet is the most common one in use with SMS (or, at least, it was as UCS-2 is more common now with emojis and such).
160 is the number of GSM-7 characters.
160*7/8 = 140 which is the number of bytes in the userdata portion of the TPDU.
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The username length restriction might come partly from that. They could surely relax it by now, though. I saw it at play this week when @SecondGentleman (15 characters) changed to @SecondGent46.
Yeah it was changed to 280 for all users in 2017. That's still the default limit, but paying users can exceed it now.