The short version
Entertainment Weekly, listing the 100 Greatest Whatever of the last ten years, mentions Twitter at #65:
Limiting yourself to 140 characters—the maximum for messages on this diabolically addictive social-networking tool—is easy once you get the
Which, if I’ve counted correctly, is 139 characters. (Actually, I didn’t count; I dumped it into TweetDeck. Full disclosure, y’know.) Doesn’t quite kill the joke, but you knew someone had to check this out, right?
Possible defense: Due to the interaction between column width and right-justification of text, “yourself,” as it appeared in the magazine (page 81, issue #1079-1080), was broken between two lines, and was duly hyphenated; maybe that accounts for the 140th character.
Then again, if you’re gonna pick nits, you might as well go for the nittiest.
CT »
6 December 2009 · 6:59 pm
Hmm. I just dumped EW’s text into regular ol’ Twitter.com’s input box, and it did come to 140 characters exactly. That’s including that final space after the final “the” — could that be the missing link?
CGHill »
6 December 2009 · 7:42 pm
Hmm. Could be. And you can’t tell if they included the space in the magazine text, because — well, it’s a space.
There’s always the possibility, though, that they did this specifically to see if some numbskull would actually go to the trouble … oh, wait. Never mind.