

Bit.ly offering even shorter j.mp URLs - fromedome
http://www.businessinsider.com/bitly-offering-even-shorter-jmp-urls-2009-9

======
jonknee
"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.

~~~
riffic
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.

~~~
steveklabnik
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.

------
Erwin
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).

~~~
aw3c2
<http://ai/> is my favourite

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

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

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

------
IncidentalEcon
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?

~~~
AndrewDucker
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.

~~~
thorax
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).

~~~
jballanc
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).

~~~
thorax
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.

~~~
blasdel
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 &amp; and murdering unicode in weird ways -- always
truncating the message at an arbitrary tier instead of validating/refusing it
up front.

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

~~~
shughes
Sigh.. That joke sucked.

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

~~~
byrneseyeview
Geopolitical hedging.

------
nader
what the f*ck?

------
trezor
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=...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/9549?version=0.4.1)

~~~
windsurfer
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.

