[DoubleMalt]

I don't think risking url rendered as unicode boxes justifies the reduction of the url by 2 or 3 characters.

Nice proof of concept though.

[berdario]

Not only that, but since it will be encoded in utf-8 and then percent-encoded the number of bytes transmitted will actually increase:

something as simple as 邗諾

becomes %E9%82%97%E8%AB%BE , 18 characters!

Still, as other mentioned it's a neat idea that if widespread would make all kinds of encoding mistakes pop up :)

[billpg]

But twitter will only count it as two characters. (I guess.)

[pornel]

Twitter doesn't pay attention to URL length any more. They will force all URLs through t.co even if that makes them longer.

[Karunamon]

I've found that it doesn't like to shorten certain things, though I haven't quite nailed down what "certain things" are. I tried linking a recent blog post I'd done, which is at least 30 characters (along the lines of http://website/really-neat-post-title), and when I pasted or typed it into the tweet, it wouldn't autoshorten and would consume those characters.

I find myself using goo.gl a distressing amount of time on Twitter.

[GrinningFool]

The interesting thing about that is that twitter will still generally redirect it.

As an experiment some time ago I grabbed a random sampling of URLs from twitter's limited firehose - and found that on average they spread the user's trail across no fewer than 4 redirects before the final destination was reached. Some as many as 7 or 8.

I've stopped posting URLs to twitter, out of respect for my followers.

[uptown]

The added benefit of using Google's URL shortener with Twitter is that you can send those links by DM while others are blocked.