[397 characters / 3 messages]

The reason Twitter is 140 rather than 160 characters seems to relate to differences in the size of SMS messages in different countries. If you encode each character with 7 bits you get 160 characters out of 1,120 bytes but if you use 8 bits per character you only get 140 characters. Be glad you didn’t live somewhere where they needed 16 bits per character back when you used to pay 12p a text ;)