An alternative to URL shorteners for twitter

As stated before on this blog, I’m a heavy twitter user. I tried to quit twitter and found that it was hard to leave. Eventually I just gave in. Now I’m following somewhere between 100 and 200 accounts.

Sometimes I want to say or quote something that’s just below 140 characters, but I feel obligated to provide some context. In those situations, I usually wind up cutting out some punctuation or text in order to fit a shortened URL. Not anymore—if it’s searchable.

I created a new twitter account called @srch. If you click on the twitter ID, it takes you to @srch’s twitter profile. On that page are instructions that will let the savvy user know that if they have decent searching skills, they can probably find where the text came from.

Please let me know what you think of this idea.

2 Responses to An alternative to URL shorteners for twitter

  1. Jim Jeffers says:

    Ben I don’t think this is a really feasible concept. I think most people are going to have a WTF moment. You’re better off just reducing your quote and pasting a tiny url. Your head is in the right place though.

  2. Ben Atkin says:

    After thinking about it, I came to a similar conclusion. Most would find it at least mildly annoying, even if they had seen it before.

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