Storing everything in the URL is a feature I just rolled out today. The HN submission is in honour of that. You can of course post it without the http://pix.pe/? to twitter, paste that chunk of letters back in, and it will work. Here is an example of how that looked:

https://twitter.com/ZenSaiyuki/status/373400181338693632

Which is neat, and purist and all, but people didn't know what the "gibberish" was, so making it a link is a compelling improvement, it would seem :)

I was really inspired by the twitter image compression challenge http://stackoverflow.com/questions/891643/twitter-image-enco...