Playing devil's advocate, my first response would be to register accounts for, say, the 2,500 most common English words and then compose some rather nice essays.

@Yes, @something @like @that @might @prove @quite @funny.

Length of mentions could be capped at 140 to prevent this hack.

> I'm 100% with you. Honestly, my "prefect Twitter" would be to keep the 140char limit, but to exclude @ mentions, photos, and links from the limit.

Right now, there's a real benefit to having short Twitter handles, because they count less against the limit (longer ones really add up in Twitter conversations that involve multiple people).

I understand why usernames count towards the limit, but I wish they didn't.

You know what a good solution to that? Constant cost for @mentions. Each one costs you two characters.

While you are at it, urls cost you 5. Images cost you 10.

Removes the benefit of shorter twitter handles, longer twitter handles doesn't fuck up what you are trying to say and, you can talk to multiple people in the same tweet.

Ooh, I like this!

However, I feel like it would be weird for people to adopt, and probably put people off of Twitter, since paying attention to a 1-1 limit is annoying enough.

I don't think it would require any conscious effort on the end user, the remaining char counter would handle all of this for them so adoption is painless

I really like this idea.