Why you actually now have fewer characters:
The real big news is that since Twitter will be running existing links through their new t.co shortener, links that are under 20 characters will actually be lengthened! So using the URL shortening service that returns the shortest URL won’t help you gain any characters anymore.
Twitter is standardizing. Unfortunately, this means that by standardizing on 20 characters for the URL, all those of who were gaining a few extra spaces by using even shorter URLs will find our tweets actually getting longer.
How this makes links safer:
Again, from the Twitter engineering post:
“…We’re trying to protect users against phishing and other malicious attacks. the way that we’re doing this is that any URL that comes through in a DM gets currently wrapped with a twt.tl URL — if the URL turns out to be malicious, Twitter can simply shut it down, and whoever follows that link will be presented with a page that warns them of potentially malicious content. in a few weeks, we’re going to start slowly enabling this throughout the API for all statuses as well, but instead of twt.tl, we will be using t.co.”
Of course, all browsers already offer this same service. The reason you can’t have enough of this is that malicious web pages often catch a few people before they are discovered to be harmful, and the sooner they can be blocked the better.
An overview:
- This service won’t be available to most of us until later this summer
- You CAN enter links that make your tweet run over 140 characters. They will be auto-shortened by Twitter’s new t.co service.
- Your wording NOT including the link itself must be 120 characters long or less
- Twitter will even “shorten” (encode) links that are already shortened—making the URL always, automatically 20 characters long
- If you use a URL that is less than 20 characters, Twitter will lengthen it to 20 characters, leaving you less room for the wording of your tweet
- The GOOD news: All URLs pass through Twitter’s new t.co service—and thus all are checked to see that they are safe.
- Links may be displayed, depending on your interface, as non-shortened links. You may be shown the whole URL, or the first part of it. This is great—you’ll be able to easily see where you’re going. Twitter says they are “removing the obscurity.” Of course, via SMS and on some other interfaces, only the short URL will display.
Where the confusion came from:
Mashable tweeted this information as “Twitter to Change Links: They Won’t Count Against the 140 Character Limit” but later updated it to reflect the information here. Mashable at first had said:
“Summary: T.co links won’t be counted in Twitter’s famous 140 character count.”
Nope: they will be counted. They will just always be 20 characters long. Mashable quotes this passage posted on the Twitter Development Talk Google Group:
“the way the Twitter API counts characters is going to change ever so slightly. our 140 characters is now going to be defined as 140 characters after link wrapping. t.co links are of a predictable length — they will always be 20 characters. after we make this live, it will be feasible to send in the text for a status that is greater than 140 characters. the rule is after the link wrapping, the text transforms to 140 characters or fewer. we’ll be using the same logic that is in twitter-text-rb to figure out what is a URL. ”
I don’t blame Mashable for getting confused. Twitter is famous for engineering-speak. There are inevitably, after every announcement, Twitter clarifications. As usual, Twitter’s official blog post itself provides few details. Had Twitter made this slight clarification (added in brackets), it would have been clearer:
“The rule is after the [length of the] link wrapping [is included], the text transforms to 140 characters or fewer.”
Where Twitter says “140 characters is now going to be defined as 140 characters after link wrapping” they mean 140 characters after adding in 20 characters for the link.
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the post.
Yes, we (Mashable) were off the mark at first, but we quickly corrected our error. We try to balance breaking the news quickly with breaking the news accurately. In this case, I could have done better, and I won’t be forgetting that.
Thanks for keeping us honest,
- Ben
Great to see twitter finally installing a linking feature. Even better to see it WON’T count to ward your 140 charcter limit!
Any ideas when this will roll out?
great information, there is one favorite website that gives out information about social networking tips
Thanks for the explanation. A standardized link length penalizes the creative link shorteners. Yes, security is important but 20 characters out of 140 is a high price to pay. There’s even less length if you want to make your links retweetable.
If t.co goes down (I’m getting Twitter fail whales all morning), all links on Twitter go down. And if t.co gets compromised (it’s now the most attractive hack target on Earth), all links on Twitter get compromised. I really REALLY don’t like the smell of this.
Twitter’s new link gives you *FEWER characters.
Looks like a fail to me. If I’ve bothered to use j.mp links and they lengthen every post by 2 characters I might just bail. I’m using Twitter to bookmark things that interest me, and might be useful to others. If they do this maybe I don’t care enough to carry on!
The real disturbing bit wasn’t even mentioned in the article. As a Twitter client developer I’m utterly disgusted by the fact that they’ll be using this system so as they can track all user clicks as they want the high-percentage of people who’re utilizing Twitter through the API. See the bit in the press release which talks about how they will use the info for analysis…
This should be a user configurable option that is, by default, off. That way those who want to use it, for convenience, can while those of us who like being able to have at least a small say in what we are doing can do so.
120 is the new 140 – more brevity is due!
Unless the URLs shortened with other services are also expanded before using t.co then there’s not much added security really.
Also, malware can still hide their phishing links with one or more layers of third party shorteners, or alter them randomly to produce different t.co links every time they’re twitted, making them just as hard to block as they were before.
Joel P. is right too. This provides attackers with a single target that, when found vulnerable (not “if”, “when”) will make the cli.gs hack look like child’s play.
If you’re looking for a way to pack more data into each Tweet I recommend something like Tweet It In. It shortens tweets by adding/replacing contractions, abbreviations, unicode chars, and removing vowels in long words. It also shortens ( long urls ) within tweets in real time while leaving short urls untouched. You can choose which options you want enabled.
http://tweetitin.com
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