> most people thought was that Twitter was stupid and would never get off the ground. I mean, who'd want a service where you can write only an amount of characters so short you can say nothing of substance?

This isn't how I recall the start of twitter. Since the transmission medium was sms/text messages, the character limit was due to what many characters could be sent in a single sms.

Twitter was seen as a genius application that allowed for sending group sms.

What it grew into, while stubbornly retaining the character limit baffled many people...