Jay

As far as point #1, even if I’m a trusted source, people trust me for different things. I might be making a post about dating or I might be making a post about social media or I might be making a post about working out or I might be linking to something a friend of mine did that I liked or I might be linking to something I saw on YouTube that I wanted to pass along… My “followers” don’t get to decide whether that TinyURL is going to my own site or to YouTube or DailyMotion or wherever. Because of this, if I want to be clear, I have to spend the extra characters putting “.. billcammack.com” behind the tinyurl link in order to specify.

On top of that, if my title explains my post, I have to waste the Twitter characters explaining my post. Therefore, automatically shortening URLs doesn’t necessarily save Twitter anything, although I agree with your point about money.

Also, let’s say that I *AM* a “trusted source” and you are not. When you RT my original post, that tinyurl is now vouched for by YOU and not ME, so people are going to be less likely to click on it and I miss out on someone reading/seeing what I have to say/show.

Plus, your RT would have been a location where billcammack.com would have gone into Twitter Search again, instead of sending TinyURL in there twice. That doesn’t help me if I want people to be able to find billcammack.com.

I would understand it if Twitter allowed you to input more than 140 characters and then TRIED to shorten what you wrote by shortening any links it found. That’s a convenience and makes sense. As it stands now, you can put a long URL in and use up all of your 140 characters, and then when Twitter shortens it for you, you end up with a post with many fewer characters than you could have used to express yourself, had you been given the number of characters left AFTER link-shortening.

” I am following a celibate life of my own choosing: http://tinyurl.com/dzdyx8 ”

I don’t know… are you just joking? Do I click the link or has a virus taken over your machine? My guess is with the number of bits that pass through Twitter even at 140 characters, saving bits saves $$.