On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 1:38 PM, explicious <[email protected]> wrote: > > I believe there is a limit to the post text, and if the URL causes the > post to exceed the determined character length, I'm not sure that > shortening it on the inbound makes sense.
Huh? It makes total sense to do this. As far as hyperlinks are concerned (on normal websites), the actual URL of the link is really metadata (stored in the href attribute), and the text representing the link (9 times out of 10) is not the actual URL, but rather something like "Click Here". On twitter the metadata and the text representation are the same (meaning there's no way to change the link text that will appear). So, twitter is doing a slight favor for us here, and instead of displaying "Click Here" to save characters, it is just using the tinyurl URL instead. Whether tinyurl is the "best" service to use for this purpose is arguable, and probably off-topic for this thread, but it does save a lot of characters. -Chad
