Chinese Twitter users live in a density 2x to 8x their English counterparts.

Michael Mitzenmacher, at Harvard, had a paper in the 2003 IEEE Data Compression Conference that gave empirical evidence that translations compressed to roughly similar sizes (using the Bible and the EU texts), but had wildly varying sizes uncompressed; this correlates well with linguistic theories.<p>ftp://ftp.deas.harvard.edu/techreports/tr-12-02.ps.gz

This is one of the reasons that texting is so darn popular in China, and email is not. Texting is <i>fast</i>, and you can pack so much info into a single SMS that you almost never need to send anything longer.<p>The same goes for books and essays. Chinese books and magazines are often shorter, just because the information density is so high. It's a neat feature of the language.<p>However, sometimes it can be demoralizing when you spend all evening writing something and realize that you've only produced a single page of text.

If you are willing to do a bit of encoding/decoding, then you can map 2 or 3 latin-1 characters onto one unicode codepoint, and then tweet with that instead.<p>My understanding of UTF-8 indicates that you can actually represent any number as one character, but somewhere in the xterm / firefox / twitter pipeline, that gets fucked up. I think I have some code on github for this, actually:<p><a href="http://gist.github.com/191446" rel="nofollow">http://gist.github.com/191446</a><p>The idea is to pack any utf-8 string into one character. It works for about 3 or 4 ASCII characters, but I think this is a perl bug rather than some fundamental limitation. Patches welcome.<p>(As an aside, I am always pleased when I get to use the (&#62;&#62;=) operator in Perl. And yes, I do pronounce it "bind" and not "right-shift-equals" ;)

Kaifu Lee mentioned the same observation in a talk. Chinese news titles usually bear sufficient information that Google news in Chinese doesn't need excerpt as counterpart in English. A Tweet in Chinese could be an essay.