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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

What is wrong with these people, just fix twitter so url's don't count to the count.

Morons.

There's no better user experience to a shortened url, it's like having unprotected sex with a random in a nightclub, you've no idea what you could end up with.

Repeat after me, shortened urls break the web and are inherently evil.

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http://That.will.probably.lead.to.abuse.as.I.can.send.a.long...

Are you a programmer or a wuss? Think this isn't easily fixable?

Sure, it's fixable. But it will be a cat and mouse game and I am not sure it's worth the effort.

Yes, it would be horrible if people could send messages longer than 140 characters via Twitter. The Internet as we know it would collapse.

Do you write articles for TechCrunch in your free time?

There was a comment on Reddit a while back about what the 140 character limit means in different places:

  In English, you get a comment.
  In Japanese, you get a poem or a brief news article.
  In Chinese, you get a short story... it might as well be a novel.

And someone gave an example Chinese tweet that translated to:

"You guys are the Sina fans other there? 'Keep on Perseverance' (some literate group) is publishing some online literature collection, referencing to the sissy poet character in the 'Cellphone' TV series. I know the people in 'Sina Literature Collection" (another group) well since junior high school; often went to their chat room to chit-chat bull. His (Keep on Perservance) main page's arrangement is overwhelming; I can't digest them. My preference is simple, slim, light-breeze style of literature. Hey, today is the clan chief's birthday, too. Don't know how he/she enjoying his/her day in Swissland. May be eating chocolate fondue? I can't do winter hibernation anymore. Have to come out. And have been messing around with you all day long."

There's a tradeoff between larger character set and easier input method. It's not trivial to input Chinese characters with keyboard. It compensates by allowing richer expressions with fewer characters.

The APL of human languages.

If Twitter doesn't check for a valid response at each URL, then this will be possible anyway. If it does check, then this wouldn't be possible anyway.

Twitter gets millions of tweets and I am sure good percentage of them will have URLs. And if they start checking valid response for each URL, I think soon they will have to build a new data center just for this task. Also, what if the URL is temporarily down? What should they do?

I don't think they need to check for valid URLs. My point is just that disguising text as a URL will be possible regardless unless you check for 404s or ellipsize the URLs. Using a URL shortener isn't necessary to make URLs count for a constant character length.

Not true at all. Sites can be configured to respond to arbitrary subdomains.

Hm. I thought of that case before I wrote my comment, so I'm not sure how I wrote something that didn't take that into consideration...

It's been said one hundred million times, but the reason is for SMS.

That's not a defence, it's an excuse.

It's not a defense. It's a fact. My co-worker prefers to receive all tweets via SMS. They advertise the SMS feature at the top of every page. Calling people names at every turn isn't going to make your point more valid.

Last I saw something like 5% of users accessed twitter using SMS. Basing your limits on a very very very niche use case seems bizarre.

Realize we are all big time nerds with smartphones. Everyone else doesn't have one (yet?).

And when Twitter started out, even fewer of us had them.

That's just a tidbit thrown around to soothe those irked by the limit. It's been well over a decade since the last mobile phone was sold that couldn't handle long/concatenated SMS. The reality is that the 140 character limit is just an arbitrary one; one that makes Twitter, Twitter.

I still can't send text messages over 160 characters to anyone not on my carrier (Verizon) so I'm not sure where you're getting that figure from.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenated_SMS

Perhaps this is another anomaly that Americans have to put up with from their carriers — not being one I wouldn't know.

That could very well be. We're underprivileged when it comes to mobiles, unfortunately.

Just out of curiosity, do US carriers allow you to send inter-carrier MMS and can you transfer your phone number between carriers?

Yes, they let you send inter-carrier MMS and you can also transfer your number between carriers.

Anecdote is not the singular of data, but I have been able to send/receive long messages using Android and iPhone on AT&T.

Just yesterday I even noticed Android's core SMS app is even nice enough to tell you when the message is overflowing into a second SMS, so you know that you and the recipient will get billed for more than one SMS. Which brings me to another idea:

Perhaps the billing issue is more of a concern as well -- receiving concatenated messages certainly would cost more for (American) users not on unlimited SMS plans, and presumably would cost more for Twitter to send out through their gateway?

It is an excuse.

At most, they need to shorten the links only for SMS; they don't need to shorten them for the API or for the website (as they've just demonstrated).

I can click on links that come in via SMS on my Droid. Why kill that emerging functionality?

Edit: I completely read what you said incorrectly. My response must make no sense.

Next time, just delete the post.

But then the tweet can't be sent in a text message anymore, and everyone has there tweets sent to their mobile phone.

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