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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

Plus, they are stupid. What, are we short of space for email? Are links people send each other consuming too much disk? I've barely touched my howevermany squigabytes GMail is giving away these days. I can guarantee that there is no "URL shortening service" that has the longevity of DNS either. If you want any more proof of a bubble, it's that it's possible to operate a business doing this.

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We're short of space for twitter messages. And maybe IRC topics.

That's not true either, there aren't many 140-char URLs anyway.

Sure, but the relatively short link to your reply, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2492783, is already 44 characters, so I'm only left with 96 characters on a twitter message.

With bit.ly, the link is much shorter with 21 characters, http://bit.ly/j8IpC8, and I'm left with 119 characters to describe the link in a twitter message.

Oh, and I'll know how many people clicked on my bit.ly link. I've become addicted to that feature.

But that's a circular argument. If there's no enough room to say what you want to say in a Twitter post then write a blog entry or send an email.

Yes it is pretty much an artificial problem created by an arbitrary limit.

It would be better if Twitter offered their own way to shorten URLs (or have a separate limit for URL length), so that you could still see where the link pointed before clicking on it.

If you use the Tweet button, either embedded in a page or installed as a bookmarklet, it will run through Twitter's own shortener. A long version of the URL will then be displayed in the Twitter UI.

The problem is "I need 20 more characters for my Tweet". This is only solved by URL shorterners, at the moment.

Maybe we should try 'tweet compression'? Im sure you could pack a lot more text into 144 characters using the right compression algorithm.

Dammit i missed april fools day to announce my 'tweet compression' service :(

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