&gt; which oddly don&#x27;t count bytes, they count code points<p>Not so odd, but very sensible! I&#x27;m always saddened by this oversight in SMS messages — they&#x27;re 160 7bit characters, so 140 octets. But those 7bit characters are the GSM charset. If you want to write in other languages than Western European ones, your message will be encoded using UTF-16 — now you only have 70 characters. It might be OK for Chinese, but it&#x27;s absolutely unusable for Cyrillic.<p>Of course, the limiting factor in SMS is architectural, whereas in Twitter, it&#x27;s philosophical, so there&#x27;s your difference.