But I would be afraid that somebody will figure out how to make a 13 character only twitter clone. This is a race that you can not win. Sooner or later some genius will make a service that allows you to broadcast nothing at all. Probably this service would even be free!1!.. killing all the other services in no time.
There's also the problem of availability of unique status updates, the lower your character count the fewer unique status updates there will be. If you launch a service with only 1 character there will only be 25 possible status updates.
People want to be unique, but they're also lazy, so it's a compromise between the two. I think 14 characters strikes the balance.
The hard thing about scaling a service like this is the social graph, AKA. when users have a lot of followers. So I'm going to use the freemium model and let users follow 10 or 20 people for free, and then start charging.
That way I'll start making money at the same time I have scaling problems.
Sure, I'll give a free premium account to anyone on HN that asks. I have a blog over at http://www.maximise.dk/blog but it's boring and there are definitely no posts that are only 14 characters.
Not quite sure yet, but neither is Twitter and it doesn't seem to stop them. The about page addresses the subject briefly: http://twittewittewit.com/about.php
But I would be afraid that somebody will figure out how to make a 13 character only twitter clone. This is a race that you can not win. Sooner or later some genius will make a service that allows you to broadcast nothing at all. Probably this service would even be free!1!.. killing all the other services in no time.