• Typical social networks have been built around ideas like who you already know (Facebook) and where you’ve worked (LinkedIn).

• We’ve made Twitter into a tool that allows us to connect with and interact with people based on the kinds of stuff we share.

  ~A new kind of network, by David Aron Levine

David Aron Levine further wrote: “However, it wasn’t built around this concept exactly. It was really built around the idea of making it easy to share quick updates with people we know. (Remember: the concept of a “re-tweet”, an @ reply, and “hashtags” came from the community). The fact that we’ve collectively hacked it for the purpose of sharing and connecting with a new group of people might say more about our demands than it does about the service itself.”

Yes, there was a demand, but the main question still exists: how did it happen? The answer is … characters’ limitation.

We can’t express ourselves by more than 140 per twit. As Charles IX wrote in this context about half thousand years ago, “horses and poets should be fed not fattened“.

In other words, the Twitter’s basic feature – that David Aron Levine is discussing – appeared as one of the side effects of the above meant technical limitation.