Twitter should solve this problem, they should stick links separately to the 140 characters. Like they don't force you to encode the picture of the person in the 140 characters.

For SMS, well if the link goes beyond 140, send it in a separate SMS? Should SMS messaging compatibility for Twitter break the whole paradigm of transparency of addressing on the web?

Time to move on and create solutions looking forward, not backward.

FriendFeed FTW. You can attach photos [separately], and each FriendFeed post can have a comment thread.

It's not like SMS is limited to 160 characters, anyway.

That's a stupid design decision on the part of Twitter, which the rest of the Internet is paying for.

At the very least, Twitter could only shorten URLs when messages go out via the SMS gateway, and not universally. All they'd need to do is count any valid URL as 20 characters (length of a bit.ly shortened URL) for the purpose of the limit, while preserving the actual real URL up until that limit actually mattered.

The sad and ironic part is that the 140-character limit and the URL shorteners it spawned will probably stick around, due to Twitter, far longer than Twitter-via-SMS does. I don't know many people who even use Twitter via SMS anymore; it was a cool feature initially, but it's being quickly obsoleted by smartphones that can access Twitter via much more user-friendly interfaces via TCP/IP.

"140 characters" is likely to become the "4 feet, 8-1/2 inches" of the Internet. Totally arbitrary, far from ideal, nearly impossible to change.

eg most people.

You got me ;)