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Comment by TheDong | Hacker News Reader

I'm not asking why they use t.co. I'm asking why it counts against my tweet length. If I want to tweet 140 characters and they interpret some of them as a link, why can I no longer tweet my 140 characters because something on their system turned it into 150 characters? They could shorten it while still using my url's length for accounting. They already let you tweet more than 140 bytes due to unicode so it's clearly not a technical reason such as a char(140) db column.

They very well could simply take min(len(t.co/url), len(orig_url)) without breaking any past tweets or changing the 140 character limit's spirit. It would just behave more logically.

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The 140 character limit isn't just an arbitrary number to see how creative people can be within it. Many people forget or never knew that twitter started out with its 140 character limit because of SMS limitations. SMS limits messages to 160 characters, and twitter reserves 20 of those. The final result of your message, including URLs has to fit within 140 characters to reach any SMS bound audience in a single message.

But that's not the case now. The SMS limit is 160 7-byte characters, basically ASCII. But as parent noted, "They already let you tweet more than 140 bytes due to unicode so it's clearly not a technical reason such as a char(140) db column.".

So why do they do it here?

(1) Keeping it simple and consistent and (2) they want to ensure that as much relevant traffic goes through t.co as possible. If you want to lock people into t.co URLs, there's no reason for them to play games otherwise unless it truly starts eating into the character count. It's an avenue for profit through data mining. Also, the notion of blocking phishing sites is also there, but the real reason is data mining. They want as much desired, relevant data as possible about the URLs people are using on their service — where they're going, when they're going there, who's going there, etc., etc., etc. In the data, there is money. It's also about other untaped potential in being the middle man (e.g., injected ads) — not that they'll necessarily do such a thing, but from their perspective it's good to be in the position to exploit as many avenues of profit as possible.

You misunderstood. I meant that they could use the minimum of those two lengths when checking the length of your tweet while still turning it into a t.co url either way. All traffic still goes through t.co. The behavior is identical to today except that it's simpler and consistent because it doesn't make my 140 character tweet invalid.

They could do something along those lines, but that would not be "keeping things simple". Plus, there is not significant motivation for them to do it — plain and simple. They could, but so far it's not worth the time/money investment. Every little feature, every little bit of work added and layered onto things has an associated cost/benefit to it. Simply put, it's not worth it to them at this present time.

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