What's particularly silly about all this is that when using the website to tweet you by definition do not need a URL shortener. You are not allowed to type more

What's particularly silly about all this is that when using the website to tweet you by definition do not need a URL shortener. You are not allowed to type more than 140 characters in the input field, so your message is necessarily already under 140 chars, so the shortening does nothing. I find this particularly frustrating since I have a message with a perfectly legible URL, hit send, and all of a sudden its a short URL that now one know where it goes anymore. If it auto shortened your URL as you pasted it in (as opposed to after hitting reply/send), then it would at least allow to type more, but as it is, the auto shortening serves no user-purpose.