Twitter Character Count Issues

I set WhatPulse up for Twitter a couple days ago. Manual and automated tweets didn’t tweet, even though the Manual tweet said it was successful.

I came back today and noticed: “158 characters (2 left)”

Twitter has a 140 character limit, not a 160 character. So, even though the counter indicated “2 left”, I really had -18 left and this resulted in silent tweet failure.

It also seems that the character count may be off by one:

“Since 2007-01-03: I’ve typed 28,546,555 keys (0.22/sec) and made 6,755,679 mouse clicks (0.05/sec). Ranking me 1794th on WhatPulse.”

is being counted as 132 characters, even though it only has 131.

PS: Manual tweets will report “done” even if you hit cancel to the “Are you sure you want to tweet?” prompt that pops up. That can be slightly misleading.