twitter could have easily implemented some kind of even shorter system by using some kind of rarely-used hash tag character like this: Check out this link : ±x

twitter could have easily implemented some kind of even shorter system by using some kind of rarely-used hash tag character like this: Check out this link : ±xyz7g Which would be auto-parsed to http://bit.ly/xyz7g http://bit.ly/xyz7g. That would save 13 characters.