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Comment by _dan | Hacker News Reader

The former. Even though it's 355 characters, at least it tells me it's a Google maps link. Which the shortened version doesn't.

There are some situations where URL shortening is arguably useful. But there's absolutely no reason why "microblogging" should be one of them.

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You could use this bookmarklet which translates all short URL's in to long ones. But then again maybe you do not trust longurlplease.com.

  javascript:void(function(){if(typeof%20jQuery%20==%20'undefined'){var%20s=document.createElement('script');s.src='http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.6/jquery.min.js;document.getElementsByTagName(head)[0].appendChild(s);}var%20l=document.createElement(script);l.src=http://www.longurlplease.com/js/jquery.longurlplease.js;document.getElementsByTagName(head)[0].appendChild(l);function%20runIfReady(){try{if($.longurlplease){%20$.longurlplease();%20clearInterval(interval);}}catch(e){alert(sadsda)}};%20var%20interval%20=%20window.setInterval(runIfReady,100);}())

That inline bookmarklet didn't work in Safari 4 (OSX 10.6), but the bookmarklet from http://www.longurlplease.com/ did--thank you for sharing it.

Spoken like a person without a Twitter account.

eg most people.

Twitter should solve this problem, they should stick links separately to the 140 characters. Like they don't force you to encode the picture of the person in the 140 characters.

For SMS, well if the link goes beyond 140, send it in a separate SMS? Should SMS messaging compatibility for Twitter break the whole paradigm of transparency of addressing on the web?

Time to move on and create solutions looking forward, not backward.

FriendFeed FTW. You can attach photos [separately], and each FriendFeed post can have a comment thread.

It's not like SMS is limited to 160 characters, anyway.

That's a stupid design decision on the part of Twitter, which the rest of the Internet is paying for.

At the very least, Twitter could only shorten URLs when messages go out via the SMS gateway, and not universally. All they'd need to do is count any valid URL as 20 characters (length of a bit.ly shortened URL) for the purpose of the limit, while preserving the actual real URL up until that limit actually mattered.

The sad and ironic part is that the 140-character limit and the URL shorteners it spawned will probably stick around, due to Twitter, far longer than Twitter-via-SMS does. I don't know many people who even use Twitter via SMS anymore; it was a cool feature initially, but it's being quickly obsoleted by smartphones that can access Twitter via much more user-friendly interfaces via TCP/IP.

"140 characters" is likely to become the "4 feet, 8-1/2 inches" of the Internet. Totally arbitrary, far from ideal, nearly impossible to change.

You got me ;)

Yeah, I don't get why shorteners don't have the option to do something like http://tri.im/maps.google.com/8HkN - short but still insightful (way better than 'visit this preview page')

> it tells me it's a Google maps link. Which the shortened version doesn't

See http://twi.bz/ .

"twi.bz shortens web addresses without completely obscuring where the link ends up. By keeping part of the domain name in the twi.bz link it's possible to instantly see the site you'll end up on by clicking the link."

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