That's common knowledge. They were asking, why is it STILL the right length?
If Twitter want to encourage short form content, there are other ways to do it. Either hide 141 onwards behind a [+more] link or style the long ones differently so they have less impact.
Better yet, create multi-panel tweets so content is still presented bite-sized, but in a way that people can delve as deeply as they like.
I could see a version of Twitter that is similar in a way to the latest Instagram release (allowing for up to 10 images per post). So on Twitter you could have up to 10 tweets in a single post. Each still 140 char. Only the first one shows up in everyone's feed (just like it does today) and you swipe/scroll/page to the side to see additional pages. If the first 140 is intriguing enough people will scroll sideways to read more.
I've posted about that concept before. I think it's a no-brainer and it baffles me that they're yet to do it, and that it took Instagram so long to have their equivalent.
Tweet storms are only getting more common in my experience. Further, entire newspaper articles could be presented as a series of bite-sized pieces. Just limit the first one to 140 IMO.
It's also common knowledge that arbitrarily changing a standard costs money. They have to educate hundreds of millions of users, re-jigger their databases and services, and forego a well known trademark feature of their product. Why bother? Everyone's memorized that it's 140 characters, and people have adapted pretty well to 140-character microblogging. Would 1,000 have been better? Possibly, possibly not. I think Twitter's fundamental problems run deeper than the SMS limitation; apart from some celebrity accounts with tens of millions of followers such as @RealDonaldTrump etc., they are starting to lose relevance compared to Facebook and other, more dynamic services.
