I love it! I snagged http://➡.ws/♥ ... much fun to be had, here. Great job!
I'm pretty sure services like Twitter count bytes, not characters. So unicode will not give you much by ways of savings characters.
Also, analytics make the shorteners these days, not length. They're all pretty much short enough, no?
Sorry for the accidental downvote-- I have a reflex of downvoting people who reply to the wrong comment and I forgot this was my own thread. Sorry. :(
Twitter is doing a character count and doesn't care about bytes-- if it did, it means that tweeting in non-ASCII languages only gets half the characters. That's not exactly fair.
If people like the service, we'll be adding metrics and even allow people to search for tinyarrows that were associated with a particular domain.
It's more of something fun-- we're not trying to change the world or anything. We make a lot of sites/toys and this is just one of the fun ones to share with people.
We make a lot of sites/toys and this is just one of the fun ones to share with people.At the peak of .Com days, there was a startup that promised to bridge e-mail and snail mail: one can use their service to email people who don't have an email account or connectivity, and it would be delivered through snail mail.
Maybe some of the clients or the SMS stuff doesn't like it, but the core site will let you type 140 unicode characters and share that with people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS#Message_size
SMS can use the default 7-bit GSM encoding, an 8-bit encoding or UTF-16, giving maximum lengths of 160, 140 or 70 chars/code points, respectively.
That said, I think a lot of phones don't have full unicode support.