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Ask HN: Review my project: Using unicode to break Twitter's 140 char limit

15 points by chaosmachine 17y ago

I was thinking about unicode the other day, and I realized the look-alike characters could be used to bypass Twitter's 140 letter limit, so I put together this little app. As far as I know, this is the first time anyone's written an app to exploit unicode this way. I looked at a bunch of other "tweet shorteners", but none of them really delivered. I figure if people will switch URL shorteners to save a few letters, they might find this useful, too. http://tweetcompressor.com/

nfnaaron 17y ago
Very clever．Nicely done.
- nfnaaron 17y ago
  And if you carefully examine my parent comment, you'll find that it works here on HN.
chaosmachine 17y ago
Link: http://tweetcompressor.com/ http://tweetcompressor.com/
proexploit 17y ago
I really like your idea and the simple effectiveness of your design. I personally am very put-off by Twitter's character limit (not that I use it anyways). I hope it gets some users, maybe try to contact a popular platform or create an API to integrate with other existing services? I guess that depends on if you're just trying to fix a problem and get your name out or generate revenue.
shiro 17y ago
Haha, it's clever. Did you limit the list of compressable characters by frequency? Since there seem more of them; U+3370-33DF range (from which you took 'ms', 'ns', 'cc' etc) also has 'da', 'bar', 'in', 'log', 'mil', 'mol', 'ha', 'gal' etc. Also U+32CD 'erg' U+2480-249B and U+1F101-1F10A has digit(s) + punctuation (i.e. '1.' ... '20.' and '0,' ... '9,') I wonder how these play with searches, though.
- chaosmachine 17y ago
  I had to restrict myself to combinations that show up properly on most computers. I actually did a big user test, and had about 20 different people send me screenshots of unicode glyph tables, so I could see what worked and what didn't.
  - shiro 17y ago
    Awesome. You might want to note so somewhere in the site? I guess I'm not the only one who wants to make the comment.
csomar 17y ago
Clever idea，however the compression ratio doesn't seem to be enough to make a real diﬀerence; try㏌g it a few times，this will only save you few characters. (Saved 4 char in this comment)

15 points by chaosmachine 17y ago

nfnaaron 17y ago

Very clever．Nicely done.

nfnaaron 17y ago
And if you carefully examine my parent comment, you'll find that it works here on HN.

chaosmachine 17y ago

Link: http://tweetcompressor.com/ http://tweetcompressor.com/

proexploit 17y ago

I really like your idea and the simple effectiveness of your design. I personally am very put-off by Twitter's character limit (not that I use it anyways). I hope it gets some users, maybe try to contact a popular platform or create an API to integrate with other existing services? I guess that depends on if you're just trying to fix a problem and get your name out or generate revenue.

shiro 17y ago

Haha, it's clever. Did you limit the list of compressable characters by frequency? Since there seem more of them; U+3370-33DF range (from which you took 'ms', 'ns', 'cc' etc) also has 'da', 'bar', 'in', 'log', 'mil', 'mol', 'ha', 'gal' etc. Also U+32CD 'erg' U+2480-249B and U+1F101-1F10A has digit(s) + punctuation (i.e. '1.' ... '20.' and '0,' ... '9,') I wonder how these play with searches, though.

chaosmachine 17y ago
I had to restrict myself to combinations that show up properly on most computers. I actually did a big user test, and had about 20 different people send me screenshots of unicode glyph tables, so I could see what worked and what didn't.
- shiro 17y ago
  Awesome. You might want to note so somewhere in the site? I guess I'm not the only one who wants to make the comment.

csomar 17y ago

Clever idea，however the compression ratio doesn't seem to be enough to make a real diﬀerence; try㏌g it a few times，this will only save you few characters. (Saved 4 char in this comment)