I doubt they thought that far ahead, at least when Twitter was starting. Smartphones didn’t really exist back then, except maybe some BlackBerrys and Palm Pilot-type phones. The 140 character limit on Twitter was so the tweets could fit in a standard 160 character SMS message. It operated basically entirely over SMS; I’m not sure they even had a web version in the early days. I still remember getting messages on my flip phone from 40404, the number they used. Once I was in the Oregon desert on vacation for a week without signal and when I got back to a signal my phone kept buzzing for 20 minutes as all the tweets I’d missed were delivered. No algorithm back then, you got everything from people you followed, and no advertising either.
I doubt they thought that far ahead, at least when Twitter was starting. Smartphones didn’t really exist back then, except maybe some BlackBerrys and Palm Pilot-type phones. The 140 character limit on Twitter was so the tweets could fit in a standard 160 character SMS message. It operated basically entirely over SMS; I’m not sure they even had a web version in the early days. I still remember getting messages on my flip phone from 40404, the number they used. Once I was in the Oregon desert on vacation for a week without signal and when I got back to a signal my phone kept buzzing for 20 minutes as all the tweets I’d missed were delivered. No algorithm back then, you got everything from people you followed, and no advertising either.