A somewhat minor note for those not following Twitter (for which I do not blame you, at all), a couple of years ago Twitter raised the character-count limit for a tweet using a ‘Western Latin’ character set from 140 characters to 280.

The character-count for a number of non-Latin charset remain at 140 though, for example Chinese Han and Japanese Kanji among others. I cannot confirm these since I neither speak nor write in either, but they say you can write whole short-stories in 140 characters with these character sets.