While Internet slang and abbreviations have become second nature for some technophiles, many of us have trouble converting our words into the pseudo-gibberish sometimes required to make long messages fit into the 140 character limit set by Twitter. 140it, a new service put together over the weekend by the guys behind Yipit, is looking to help. The site will instantly convert whole sentences into condensed text, making common substitutions (like ‘r’ instead of ‘are’), using bit.ly to shorten links, and swapping company names for their StockTwits symbol. The service does its best to retain coherence, cutting extra spaces first and only cutting vowels as a last resort, according to one of its founders.
While there are a few other services like TweetShrink and Twonvert that do the same thing, those sites require you to visit their homepages – something that is easy to forget and usually more trouble than it’s worth. 140it offers a bookmarklet that will immediately make the conversion as you enter your Tweet on the Twitter homepage (see the video below for a demo).
I personally detest using abbreviations unless they’re absolutely necessary (they make my head hurt). But in those cases when I just can’t make everything fit, 140it will come in handy.
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2967732&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1
140it Demo from Vinicius Vacanti on Vimeo.