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Tweet Shrink tries it's very best to fit your text within the harsh constraints of a tweet by replacing common phrases, symbols and anything it can get it's hands on. Kind of like running your new text through the dryer or sending it to fat camp.
We wanted to use TweetShrink in our iPhone app but ran into problems with very limited usability of the TweetShrink API. We cannot set target number of characters that we want returned - TweetShrink will shrink the whole message instead only shrinking until target character number is met. Also, if a character number cannot be met because text cannot be shrunk to it, it's good to have a flag that provides an error code. Also, it'd be very good customization feature of the API if the query could include level of shrinkage algorythm (from very conservative and least shrinking to wild and goofy and most shrinking).
Finally, and that's more of a feature request than simple API addition, allow the API query to tell TweetShrink what to do with text if maximum number of characters cannot be met - either to return it's best shot, or use a third-party or first-party feature similar to Twerbose and TweetLonger and ShortText to save text and return a link at the end of the query result that leads to the original, long text via web page.
Take company names like Microsoft and Google and turn them into their stock abbreveations such as $msft and $goog. Only do so if the names are capitalized so people don't say "i'm eating a $aapl'.
Also, take links and if possible, shrink them into a is.gd link or bit.ly link if people have not done it already.
I would love something like this in TweetShrink... shrinking adaptively, only as much as necessary for maximum efficiency.
For instance: say a long update contains "I can not believe it!", and use this sentence as a representation of the entire thing.
-if the tweet is just barely over the limit, "I can't believe it!" would suffice.
-if just a little more is needed to fit in 140 characters, take out the apostrophe. "I cant believe it!"
-Should we need to be more dramatic, one level up: "I cnt believe it!" (what tweetshrink currently does)
-Now we can get more creative... the sentence still makes sense if we remove the I and its accompanying space, for instance (something I sometimes wish TS did for me, already, from the start). Someone smarter than I can suggest a good way to abbreviate "believe" in levels.
But I think I've gotten my idea across-- hey, it's just a suggestion. Too many tweets are being well over-shortened . An "optimal" result isn't always the absolute shortest possible, but the most intelligently abbreviated. IMHO.
Ok, what we're looking for here is the single word or phrase that allows maximum shrinkage. Please feel free to make suggestions, and we can all vote on which ones we really like! Remember, we're not trying to achieve "leet speak" or "text message lingo" (even though sometimes it seems like it), just clear, short tweets. Here are a couple examples:
I've implemented tweet shrinking in Twitulater but since I can't read the shrunk garble very easily and can thus fairly assume that there are others out there who cannot I doubt many people will be using the feature.
But if there was a simple way to automatically detect what tweets were shrunk, then send them to the API and get a translation back, so the whole shrinking would be transparent to the user that would be AWESOME.
Think about it, you send a shrunk tweet, and the other end sees it as normal language. Wouldn't that be great?
The heuristic to discover shrunk tweets is probably very simplistic, translation not so much, but whomever made the shrinking algorithm can easily make a deshrinker no?
We want suggestions for contractions that we might have missed that can help shave letters off some of these long tweets without making it seem like "leet speak". Examples we have already received are:
we are => we're (1 letter)
i am => i'm (1 letter)
we will => we'll (2 letters)
We really want the ones where you save multiple letters.
"right" should be shrunk to either "rite" or "ryt." "have to" should be shrunk to "hav2." "what" should be shrunk to "wat." "good" should be "gud," "love" to "luv," and "great" to "gr8." "that" should be shrunk to "dat." i'm tired of fixing it in tweetdeck.
Im trying to find the API mentioned in the about page but I can't. I'd like to incorporate Tweetersrhink in www.twittastic.net which is currently in something like an alpha mode.
Probably something you've already considered.... Are custom word lists possible at some point with Tweetdeck? Some things I'd like shrunk, others I'd like left alone. Being able to add/remove entries would give users a bit of flexibility to suit their posting style.
Supporting obvious contractions would be great, too, like I am -> I'm doesn't seem to (yet?) work. I'd also like to be able to set up custom acronyms and the like for conversations with others that I know will understand them (business terminology, catch phrases, etc).
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Logan Koester
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on June 15, 2009 03:55
Ajit D'Sa (Official Rep)
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on December 26, 2008 22:54
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