120 Characters
November 28, 2007 - 0 Comment(s)
For the last couple of years I’ve heard many people say (and read in many articles) that 120 characters is too limited a space to say anything meaningful. In most cases, people are talking/writing about the limits of 120 characters in relation to an emergency situations - when critical information needs to be conveyed.
I agree that 120 characters is limited, but I think many people don’t really know what 120 characters “looks” like. Let’s see a few example…all of these are no more than 120 characters…
“Some people say that 120 characters is too small a space to say anything meaningful. I disagree. this is 120 characters.”
“All classes canceled today. We’ll resume our normal schedule tomorrow. For further info, log on to the school website.”
“Security alert. Shots fired on East Campus. Please stay in your current location and lock all doors. More info shortly.”
As you can see, you can actually get a decent amount of information across in 120 characters. And as more organizations increase their baseline limit to 140 characters, there’s even more space.
Of course I wish that SMS wasn’t quite so limited (personally, I’d like to see about a 300 character limit), but I think there’s more room for information in that space than people acknowledge. It’s also important to remember that the limit is a benefit - it’s one of the reasons SMS is so fast and is definitely one of the aspects that makes it so appealing to so many people (young people in particular). It forces sender to get to the point immediately and not send unnecessary information. And who says you (read “schools”) can only send one message? If the messages are important and relevant, are people going to be upset about receiving two messages? Given the volume of messages college students send and receive every day, I hardly think this is a problem.
Is 120 characters limiting? Yes. Is it “too” limiting? I don’t think so. After all, do you want all your messages to be as long as this post?
