140 characters introduced a new form of brief communications that the web has embraced. The brevity and utility is great. But the founders didn’t know exactly how it was going to be used when they settled on 140 characters (originally designed to accommodate SMS limitations). Now nearly two-thirds of tweets contain usernames, links or both – which was not the original intent (remember, @ replies were user-invented). These adaptations are what has allowed Twitter to grow into what it is today, but at the cost of precious space.

So let’s adapt to real-world use and remove links and usernames (1 per tweet) from the character count. 140 characters of message and context is what was originally intended. If we were to give back those characters used in nearly all tweets to be used for context and sentiment – we’ve achieved the perfect balance. Let us use the whole 140 characters for meaningful text and the usefulness of Twitter goes up exponentially.

The only downside would be for URL shorteners, but I think most users would still use them, if not for their click-tracking abilities alone. It would also allow more transparency in links so users would know where they are headed. A good compromise would be for Bit.ly and others to license their technology to blogs and websites giving us a hybrid (like http://techcrunch.com/Xytv) - now the domain is visible and we have some idea of where we are going. This isn’t possible today because we’re looking for any way possible to save characters.

If we’re not limited by link and username character counts, we have more space for relevance and context, and I think that would make Twitter a lot more useful.