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Comment by intellection | Hacker News Reader

Is it un/reasonable to consider moving hashtags out of tweets and into metadata or just separate?

Just as useful, but can be styled separately. Evolved hashtags, backwards compatible.

That would make sense to me. I always thought it was odd that you weren't allowed to attach a link as metadata, causing the rise of all the various URL shorteners.

The tweet still needs to fit into 140 characters, including any metadata you want visible to the recipient. Think SMS.

Hence, might as well make it a user-manageable item in the tweet itself.

I know that was the original idea, but I wonder how many people in the last year or two receive tweets via SMS. If I was in charge, it's a tradeoff I'd be willing to make.

The entire world is not the United States. :) "Feature" phones and spotty data service are still very common in certain regions, but SMS works almost anywhere with cell infrastructure (or via sat phones).

But then how useful are URL's in an SMS? I would trade off a slight decrease in usability for dumbphones for increased legibility for PC/smartphones.

I wonder if we don't have the technological means to send short-urls only through SMS and real links everywhere else.

Not quite true -- tweets can include in_reply_to metadata, indicating the last tweet responded to, and location metadata, indicating where the tweet was sent. And of course, the account that sent the tweet is metadata, and so is the time it was sent.

And for my money, the reason they wrap every link through t.co is because this way they have analytics on every link clicked on Twitter. That sounds pretty valuable to me.

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