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Comment by DoubleMalt | Hacker News Reader

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.

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 :)

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

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

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.

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

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.

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