For all talk about the power of brevity on Twitter (140 characters or less), there’s a growing number of services offering ways to get around the character limit.
A good example is tweetshrink, which takes your Twitter messages and then reduces the number of characters using abbreviations.
Here’s an example:
Before:
hey, this is good stuff because it appears to work
After: (with seven fewer characters)
hey, this is gd stuff b/c it appears 2 work
tweetshrink is an interesting service but you have to wonder why anyone would be so keen to squeeze in more than 140 characters. After all, that’s the beauty of Twitter, isn’t it. If you’re looking to write more, perhaps Tumblr or a blog is a better option.
Technorati Tags: twitority, twitter
6 Comments
Interesting service. Tantek (@t) has some notes on his personal wiki for other suggested 'txt shorthands', which could also apply to tweets.
Although, I do feel the same way as you: why would anyone want to put more into a tweet? Being able to fit more into a tweet would encourage more words to be put into a tweet (and mangled, at that), which would take a little bit longer to comprehend, making Twitter less of a on-the-side/always-there social network, and more of an independent social network (like Facebook, where you can't multi-task as easily).
Yuck. As chris24 says "and mangled, at that". One of the points in my Twitter "follow policy: "If u r cnstntly abbrvtng I wont folow u."
"Shrink Your Tweets" actually brought to mind a service that would psychoanalyze your tweets. Does such a thing exist yet? Could be fun. As for squeezing more into twitter — defeats the purpose.
Thing I thought right away was: Don’t people know how to do this on their own already? I mean, it’s adding a time-consuming step to accomplish something I already know how to do. And surely, you can’t have too much more to say in a tweet than the 140 char. w/ abbr. allows for, right?
If you are using TweetDeck, TweetShrink is already built in for you. What is nice is that if you do have a post that is just a little bit too long, a quick click might just save you from pulling out words and losing the intended meaning.
Howard Yermish has it exactly right! Tweetshrink is not meant as a way of life or something that you should constantly do. It is just a useful helper there when you need it: http://tweetshrink.com/about
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