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Comment by mreid | Hacker News Reader

Here's a self-referential URL that doesn't use any URL forwarding/shortening service:

https://twitter.com/#!/selfrefer/status/3128391843

I would love to know how this was done. Given you can't edit tweets, and the ID of said new Tweet is going to change rapidly (given the number of new Tweets per second).

Did it involve basically predicting what the number was likely to be by observing the current posting rate, tweeting a bunch of times, and then stopping when one of the tweets matched? Or am I missing something?

Yes, that's more or less how it was done. The explanation is here: http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20090805/index.html

I'd say that's all it took, a lot of automated tweeting with better guesses.

I would imagine posting a bunch of tweets at once with the same number, and deleting the ones which didn't match. That's assuming that deleted tweets completely disappear though.

It involves multiple redirects. One goes to http://simonsarris.com/recurse, which surely can be modified at any time. So, goo.gl short link to a controlled resource that shortly afterward is made to point back to the tweet.

The post I was replying to wasn't the goo.gl one; it was the @selfrefer tweet link, which has a link to the tweet at twitter.com in a tweet: http://twitter.com/SelfRefer/status/3128391843

Can you edit goo.gl URLs?

Reminds me of http://bit.ly/6EzdE

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