Sunday, 15th of February and I am in the midst of the Fira to get things up and running for the Mobile World Congress. Not only physically but also virtually.
This year we are using Twitter to organize ourselves and by following the #mwc tag its fun to see what others are doing and experiencing. I noticed that while for other purposes 160 characters per SMS or Twitter message is far to short, for the current purpose it's actually too long. 160 characters are too long, that's a thing to think about in itself. When skimming through the #mwc messages on the mobile or the PC, the 100+ character "long" messages are just too difficult to read and I mostly skip them.
It's also interesting to observe the network load at the Fira. While the fixed line Internet worked quite well this morning, throughput is now quite erratic now in the afternoon. Vodafone's public 3G network on the other hand is still doing quite well. Let's see how that changes tomorrow with several thousands of people here in addition.
In case you are interested in pictures of what's going on here, have a look at Andrew Grill's Flickr Stream.
When you write is a language that requires Unicode character set, the length of an SMS becomes 70 characters. Combined with the fact that an average word in my language is longer than in English, this makes a problem to fit a meaningful message in one SMS. I would never say that an SMS is too long.