

Ask HN: Review my project: Using unicode to break Twitter's 140 char limit - chaosmachine

I was thinking about unicode the other day, and I realized the look-alike characters could be used to bypass Twitter's 140 letter limit, so I put together this little app.<p>As far as I know, this is the first time anyone's written an app to exploit unicode this way. I looked at a bunch of other "tweet shorteners", but none of them really delivered.<p>I figure if people will switch URL shorteners to save a few letters, they might find this useful, too.<p>http://tweetcompressor.com/
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shiro
Haha, it's clever. Did you limit the list of compressable characters by
frequency? Since there seem more of them; U+3370-33DF range (from which you
took 'ms', 'ns', 'cc' etc) also has 'da', 'bar', 'in', 'log', 'mil', 'mol',
'ha', 'gal' etc. Also U+32CD 'erg' U+2480-249B and U+1F101-1F10A has digit(s)
+ punctuation (i.e. '1.' ... '20.' and '0,' ... '9,')

I wonder how these play with searches, though.

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chaosmachine
I had to restrict myself to combinations that show up properly on most
computers. I actually did a big user test, and had about 20 different people
send me screenshots of unicode glyph tables, so I could see what worked and
what didn't.

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shiro
Awesome. You might want to note so somewhere in the site? I guess I'm not the
only one who wants to make the comment.

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proexploit
I really like your idea and the simple effectiveness of your design. I
personally am very put-off by Twitter's character limit (not that I use it
anyways). I hope it gets some users, maybe try to contact a popular platform
or create an API to integrate with other existing services? I guess that
depends on if you're just trying to fix a problem and get your name out or
generate revenue.

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chaosmachine
Link: <http://tweetcompressor.com/>

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csomar
Clever idea，however the compression ratio doesn't seem to be enough to make a
real diﬀerence; try㏌g it a few times，this will only save you few characters.

(Saved 4 char in this comment)

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nfnaaron
Very clever．Nicely done.

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nfnaaron
And if you carefully examine my parent comment, you'll find that it works here
on HN.

