"By knocking out two characters from the URL, that means your tweet content can potentially be 1.4% longer."

It's sad that this isn't intentionally a satirical statement.

Agreed. I know there are some issues with people who uses Twitter via SMS but I figured by now they would found an intuitive way to ignore URL's in Tweets.

metadata such as urls do not belong inside the message body when they can be attached to a separate field per tweet.

this can even be expanded; get other useful data such as gps location or hashtags out of the body and into a metadata field.

I often recieve tweets via SMS, and then just type the bit.ly link in, because that's easier than opening up the page of whoever tweeted it and clicking the link.

I think it's an incremental improvement. It won't make or break bit.ly, but a hundred such improvements will make it a success.

You can go even shorter with help of one of the TLD registrars, e.g. http://dk./ is a working URL -- you may skip that dot in Firefox and use http://dk/ (Opera will assume you're confused and try to use dk.com).

http://ai/ is my favourite

Seeing JMP, I experienced a flash of x86 asm panic.

I never use URL shorteners in my tweets. I just figure out what the URL without all the extra shit is.

Too bad that twitter shorten the urls you liking it or not.

I confess to knowing very little about the limitations of URLs so perhaps this is s dumb question: why not go all the way down to the shortest possible? Can they just use the minimum unique string of characters? For example http://xyz7g. What are the limits?

You need a domain name, a period, a top level domain, a slash and then an address at that domain.

The shortest top level domains are the country ones - which are two characters long. The shortest domain name on top of that would be one character.

So http://j.mp/Whatever is in fact the shortest you can get.

Note that silly services like ours ( http://tinyarro.ws ) further compress the character length by using unicode after the / so the URLs never grow beyond 3 characters (and can do 2 characters for a very long time).

Last time I checked, even though the web front end counts characters, the Twitter back end counts bytes (as does, I believe, SMS). So unicode doesn't actually save anything (for twitter).

Conveniently, it does save characters on the website at entry time as their site only checks by character count. Also their backend via website doesn't validate by bytes either.

Their API has fluctuated from checking bytes and characters over time-- I think right now it checks bytes. SMS does it by bytes.

Their API has also done both simultaneously at various times, mogrifying tweets as they transition between queues/memcache.

SMS doesn't actually use bytes natively -- it's 160 7-bit characters packed into 140 bytes. As is their way, Twitter fucks this up: they use the 20 spare characters for the "username: " prefix, but limit usernames to 15 characters -- 3 are completely wasted! Why not allow usernames to be 18 characters?

They've historically fucked up plenty of other SMS encoding details like sending & escaped as & and murdering unicode in weird ways -- always truncating the message at an arbitrary tier instead of validating/refusing it up front.

It's technically possible to put a site on a top level domain. Now that ICANN has started allowing the purchase of TLDs we will soon be going to http://google and we'll probably see a URL shortener at http://l

Now if only we could get rid of that troublesome http://

well you have to have a valid domain name, and xyz7g is not one.

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. That would save 13 characters.

URLs for Twitter are facing the same problem that transistors are facing. People are going to have to start parallel tweeting.

Sigh.. That joke sucked.

What's novel about this? 3.ly has been offering 8 char URLs for a while.

I can't wait until this gets included in the Long URL Please FireFox-extension. My new favourite addon since this nonsense started.

For reference: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9549?version=...

I would like my user agent to fetch everything beyond a shortened URL automatically as a sort of protest to skew the stat counting results.