Twitter Confirms It Will Launch Its Own Link Shortener

Re:Twitter Confirms It Will Launch Its Own Link Shortener by qeorge on Wednesday April 14, 2010 @10:42PM (#1266803)

Key point is that it has to fit in 1 SMS message, that's where the whole 140 character thing comes from.

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Re:Twitter Confirms It Will Launch Its Own Link Shortener by joshu on Wednesday April 14, 2010 @11:29PM (#1266879)

Tweets already diverge from what will fit in an SMS. For example, 140 chars of unicode won't fit.

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Re:Twitter Confirms It Will Launch Its Own Link Shortener by jmhodges on Thursday April 15, 2010 @04:13AM (#1267274)

We go by bytes, not chars.

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Re:Twitter Confirms It Will Launch Its Own Link Shortener by chaosmachine on Thursday April 15, 2010 @06:17AM (#1267455)

That's incorrect, Twitter goes by characters. I actually wrote an app to exploit this loophole:

http://tweetcompressor.com/

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Re:Twitter Confirms It Will Launch Its Own Link Shortener by briansmith on Wednesday April 14, 2010 @11:03PM (#1266845)

It only has to fit in a single SMS message if the tweet is being consumed over SMS. There's no reason to do link shortening in other user interfaces.

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Re:Twitter Confirms It Will Launch Its Own Link Shortener by fredBuddemeyer on Wednesday April 14, 2010 @10:58PM (#1266828)

yes but is it worth the illegibility and extra step of shortening? how many of those sms recipients make use of the link by retying it in a browser? if there is much of a use case why not have special handling for it?

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Re:Twitter Confirms It Will Launch Its Own Link Shortener by Kilimanjaro on Thursday April 15, 2010 @04:01PM (#1268791)

I would like to know the percentage of tweets sent as SMS.

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Re:Twitter Confirms It Will Launch Its Own Link Shortener by spazmaster on Thursday April 15, 2010 @02:13AM (#1267137)

Also SMS fits 160 chars, not 140.

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Re:Twitter Confirms It Will Launch Its Own Link Shortener by barredo on Thursday April 15, 2010 @02:43AM (#1267171)

20 chars were reserved for twitter username

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Re:Twitter Confirms It Will Launch Its Own Link Shortener by blasdel on Thursday April 15, 2010 @03:28AM (#1267219)

160 7-bit characters.

Twitter usernames are 15, the ": " takes another two, and three are reserved for future sigil retardation.

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Re:Twitter Confirms It Will Launch Its Own Link Shortener by papachito on Thursday April 15, 2010 @02:49AM (#1267180)

140 doesn't include the user name, the app name and probably some more info.

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