I think Twitter officially supporting and converting URLs into a token at the time a tweet was written would do the trick fine. The 140 limit is what made them,

I think Twitter officially supporting and converting URLs into a token at the time a tweet was written would do the trick fine. The 140 limit is what made them, but URLs are obviously a point of failure and frustration, hence the near constant hulabaloo over shorteners and redirects etc. It'd surprising to me that Twitter hasn't offered an official solution for URLs yet, to be honest. They saw people were using @ to reply, and supported it. They saw hash tags and retweets show up and supported them, too. But most users go to a third party to handle links.