5 ms·

I think that would completely go against the concept of Twitter: short-form communication.

• jbellis 16y ago
  Allowing your users to determine how short is short enough would be a good thing.
• patio11 16y ago
  Is "the concept of Twitter" what people are getting value from? If not, forget "the concept". (In my circles, people seem to be getting value from "an opt-in audience of likeminded people who you may extract business value from someday which does not include your girlfriend, high school buddy, mother, or Farmville." People definitely are not using Twitter primarily for short-form communication: if they were, two tweets out of every three wouldn't include a link to long-form communication.)
  • derefr 16y ago
    > People definitely are not using Twitter primarily for short-form communication: if they were, two tweets out of every three wouldn't include a link to long-form communication.) That's not quite true; people read the short text to figure out whether they want to click the link. Even if long-form communications were allowed, there would still need to be a "title" field, for people to determine if they want to read the whole thing—which would basically be what is currently the tweet itself.
• alextgordon 16y ago
  They could detect URLs and not count them towards the total message length.
  • tkaemming 16y ago
    What would happen when those messages are delivered to a user's phone via SMS? There's still a nontrival amount of users having status updates/direct messages delivered to their mobile phones that probably wouldn't appreciate a message with a 50+ character URL (or the URL being stripped, effecting message integrity).
    • alextgordon 16y ago
      They could apply URL shortening to a tweet when delivering over SMS, if necessary.
      • deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
      • derefr 16y ago
        Or they could apply URL canonicalization to tweets delivered any other way: follow all the 302s until they get the actual page, then replace with those URLs instead. (Actually, the best approach would be to canonicalize the URL on its way in, and then shorten with a single, known URL shortener on the way out, if sending via SMS. This would stop the "shortener wars" in its tracks, which is probably a good thing, because each shortener that dies leaves dangling links in its wake.)
        • dmoney 16y ago
          and then shorten with a single, known URL shortener on the way out Which should be Twitter's own built-in shortener.
        • jrockway 16y ago
          What happens when something in the middle redirects infinitely, is slow, or is down? Does the tweet have to wait until canonicalization to show up? How long are people willing to wait? Is it acceptable to not be able to link to a site unless it's up? As OpenID implementors have noticed, these issues cannot simply be ignored. Making an untrusted HTTP request is tricky business.
          • derefr 16y ago
            The nice thing about tweeting (and most tweet clients) is that you expect people to be linking to a site they just visited, not a random URL they typed from memory. (As long as the client says "checking links..." with a little spinner beside each URL getting replaced with a check or an X, I don't think users will mind waiting.) Also, "when something in the middle redirects infinitely", sharing that link would be malicious on the part of the poster, so it's okay to make them wait for some sort of time-out. However, if you want to eat your cake and have it too, you can just change "canonicalize then shorten for SMS" to "always shorten, first pointing the shortened URL at the original URL, then asynchronously updating the shortened URL's target to the canonicalized URL, once the canonicalizing daemon has processed it."
  • romland 16y ago
    This is the immediate thought one gets, I can guarantee you that Twitter considered this. It surprises me that parent was deemed insightful. Should what parent suggests be announced I expect it would be in place for about six minutes (+/- 5) before we'd see the first Tweet with the actual message in the form of a URL. http://example.com/Hi_this_is_a_tweet ... And as someone else stated, long messages are clearly against Twitter's concept/principles/idea/whatever. The interesting part about this is that instead of URL shorteners we'd end up with domains that would just act as decoders of the link you clicked on. Good or bad, who knows. And while we're at it, let's think of the next step: It wouldn't be long before someone implemented a packer/cruncher on these messages to be able to squeeze them into a 140 character limit so that it can fit into an SMS. Then we'd realize that this is a remarkably stupid thing to do and start sending un-shortened links to blog posts again. Profit!
    • carussell 16y ago
      It surprises me that parent was deemed insightful. This isn't Slashdot. There is no "Insightful". Only upvotes. http://example.com/Hi_this_is_a_tweet* http://example.com/Hi_this_is_a_tweet* Eveyone's not going to do that on a regular basis, and Twitter can cap messages at ~1000 characters to prevent egregious abuse and maintain accessibility to SMS users. It wouldn't be long before someone implemented a packer/cruncher on these messages to be able to squeeze them into a 140 character limit so that it can fit into an SMS.* Nobody gives a shit about SMS outside of SMS. What might result is that type of service as part of the SMS gateway, which is exactly what Twitter should have done to begin with.
  • afterburner 16y ago
    Or have the link phrase count towards the limit, but not the actual link itself.