"Note about DM fails: Your service provider may split SMS messages greater than 160 characters into multiple messages. In this case, the second message will post as a normal Tweet because it doesn't begin with d+username, as the first message did. Please be careful to ensure that your messages are under 160 characters."

That could certainly be interesting.

The opposite problem sucks just as bad:

"first 160 characters... and then I calle"

"d joe_blow to tell him about the secret company merger"

reminds me of the shitty email filter the school I taught at back in the late 90s used. It would filter out curse words but it ignored spaces so if you typed something like "push it" is would see "sh it" and delete those letters. It rendered your emails basically unreadable.

Ha, ours was really naive about URLs. A lot of teachers got annoyed by it constantly blocking Weightwatchers :)

Magically aligning a perfect string at a 160 character offset, and somehow have it being a user who would have any idea about what you're discussing? A total non-problem.

I think you're vastly underestimating the amount of tweets that are typed every day.

Bizarre edge case with a non-zero chance of happening? Someone will inevitably stumble across it...

It's not magic.

There used to be(still are?) phrases you can't start tweets with. For example "get better", it had to do with the twitter SMS interface.

This was the only way to do it with the SMS interface.

I'd be really interested to see how many users still use the SMS interface. I switched away from it as soon as I got my first smartphone and haven't looked back.

My guess is that the number has recently increased, with most phone plans now offering unlimited talk+text but metered data. On a prepaid plan, when you've run out of data, some carriers will just do a hard stop on your data and others will reduce it to a slow trickle, so the SMS interface might be the best.

I very much doubt it. Using Twitter is such a way would be absolutely awful these days, and few people (outside of the tech bubble) hit their data plan limits.

The tech bubble? More like the teenagers with snapchat, youtube and twitch.

A lot of data plan limits out there are 100MB, 250MB, etc.

Twitter doesn't hog that much data.

It's not about how much data it hogs -- it's that for prepaid plans (which are the vast majority of overall subscribers worldwide), when your data runs out it often just completely turns off until you get another top-up card.

2-300MB per month on my phone, that is too much for many data plans.

SMS is much more global and accessible to countries lower on the digital divide.

I honestly wonder how many people even know the SMS gateway stuff exists at all and think Twitter can only be used via the app/site.

They could have provided a different number for direct messages.