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Sure, but the relatively short link to your reply, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2492783 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2492783, is already 44 charac
by St-Clock 15y ago
Sure, but the relatively short link to your reply, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2492783 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2492783, is already 44 characters, so I'm only left with 96 characters on a twitter message.
With bit.ly, the link is much shorter with 21 characters, http://bit.ly/j8IpC8 http://bit.ly/j8IpC8, and I'm left with 119 characters to describe the link in a twitter message.
Oh, and I'll know how many people clicked on my bit.ly link. I've become addicted to that feature.
- gaius 15y agoBut that's a circular argument. If there's no enough room to say what you want to say in a Twitter post then write a blog entry or send an email.
- StavrosK 15y agoThe problem is "I need 20 more characters for my Tweet". This is only solved by URL shorterners, at the moment.
- nickolai 15y agoMaybe we should try 'tweet compression'? Im sure you could pack a lot more text into 144 characters using the right compression algorithm. Dammit i missed april fools day to announce my 'tweet compression' service :(
- wladimir 15y agoYes it is pretty much an artificial problem created by an arbitrary limit. It would be better if Twitter offered their own way to shorten URLs (or have a separate limit for URL length), so that you could still see where the link pointed before clicking on it.
- elehack 15y agoIf you use the Tweet button, either embedded in a page or installed as a bookmarklet, it will run through Twitter's own shortener. A long version of the URL will then be displayed in the Twitter UI.