Filed under: Web services, Social Software
Extend your Twitter posts with uri.is
The 140-character limit on each post is one of the most appealing things about Twitter, but it can also be one of the most annoying. That's why uri.is was created. You can write as much as you want and click to post to Twitter, and uri.is will link to your full text via a shortened URL instead of cutting you off. Sometimes you have something that's too long to tweet, but not long enough or permanent enough to post on your blog, so uri.is offers something in between.Uri.is was built in a weekend, but it's already got some good features, like auto-shortening URLs within your posts, to make sure as much of your long post as possible actually goes out to Twitter. The developer reports that he's interested in having uri.is integrated with a major Twitter app like Seesmic or Tweetdeck, which is really the only way to achieve the goal of making it as easy to post long messages to Twitter as short ones. A bookmarklet or a Greasemonkey script would perhaps be more realistic ways to improve the service, so it's nice to see that those are in the works, too.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Marc said 5:32PM on 6-22-2009
Thanks for the writeup, Jay.
Working hard to fix bugs and add new functionality (or at least working the weekends to do it!). All feedback welcome!
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Matt said 7:15PM on 6-22-2009
This is really a great extension of Twitter. I'm happy to say that it uses some code from the urlShort Project (http://urlshort.sf.net) plus his own code to make it really work as well as it does.
I'd really love to see this adopted by some third party clients (TweetDeck, I'm looking at you) to automatically post to this if you go over 140 characters.
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Andrew Pollack said 10:10PM on 6-22-2009
ah, so the next thing is you get clients built that automatically spot the uri.is links in tweets, retrieve them, and show them to you re-expanded without effort. Soon, we have no limits of 140 characters because all the clients support this kind of tunneling -- so much for the brevity and sharpened wit sometimes found in tweets.
Clever idea. Hope it doesn't go the way I just said.
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Kevin said 11:16PM on 6-22-2009
This is a whole lot better than the people who send 2 or 3 tweets in a row instead of using their heads and being more concise by eliminating or substituting words.
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Marc said 11:31PM on 6-22-2009
That was pretty much the idea behind this. I think Twitter's limitations make a lot of sense most of the time. But sometimes you need more space, and I wanted something better than the existing workarounds.