count problem of Chinese characters

Characters are measured in bytes. One of the reasons we originally selected 140 characters as an update limit is compliance with standard SMS message limits. That is, we wanted to keep updates in a single message size.

SMS is usually limited to 140 bytes; for English, that equates to 140 characters. However, for extended European alphabets, that's not quite true; each character can require up to 4 bytes, so:

*我有一个没没

is 6 characters, but consumes 18 bytes.

*Voile est l'art du contrôle d'un bateau à voile.

is 48 characters, but consumes 50 bytes.

Additionally, when sending "international" (Unicode) messages, we're limited to 70 characters, since SMS carriers convert ALL characters into 2 bytes, doubling the size of the message.

I believe characters on the web are measured in the same way-- if you run out of space, it's because each character takes up more space than a letter from the English alphabet, which is what we're measuring against.