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Intelligent Shrinking
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.
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.
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Inappropriate?As I am developing against the API now I couldn't agree more. I'd love to be able to get "MOST" shrinkage or "TO SIZE" shrinkage.
I want to say "shrink to 140" and it only does something if it needs to. Or "shrink as much as possible".
Reason is this:
I want to implement tweetshrink deeply into my application, so it's not a user election. But I can't do that if when a user types:
I love that movie. It is great!
The user gets back
I <3>s definitely not good) -
Inappropriate?Hi there,
Good idea! We discussed this at the beginning - but our fear was for 90% of the shrinkers, they won't notice any change - and might think it's not working.
What do you think?1 Comment
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This is one of the best points
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True... but if you added an element to the API to allow developers to perform this kind of function, then it can be up to us to expose the "shrink rate" to the user. -
Inappropriate?hmm... the html busted my message
The API gave me back
I <3 that movie. its gr8!
That is not acceptable when I have 140 characters to play with. My users will sound like they are kids in a chat room, and won't want that representing them.
Also, note the "its" in the returned value. I lost the capitalization, which is definitely not good. -
Inappropriate?hdm42 & bladnman, what projects are you guys working on? maybe if we take a look we can offer some suggestions. cheers!
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Inappropriate?I am not at liberty to announce publicly yet. Suffice it to say it's an iPhone Twitter client. We have implemented "auto-shrink" into the application but it looks like we are going to pull it for these reasons.
I will continue to push for an option for the user to shrink the message. At issue is (for example) a business person utilizing our application sending a message just a bit too long that includes
"I love your new website"
They (as you know) end up with
"i <3 yr new website"
To a professional, the "yr" is probably okay, but the compression of "love" would not be and it would be our fault. I would prefer that the shrinking be done to get down as close to 140 (or whatever is sent in) as possible. Rather than as small as possible.
Does that make sense?
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