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.
140it Demo from Vinicius Vacanti on Vimeo.
I’ll use this.
Loic needs to build this into Twhirl, then it’ll be really useful.
Me too, very useful tool.
Hi Michael,
If condensing text doesn’t always suit your needs, try BigTweet.
Besides having a lot of nice features for posting to Twitter from the Web via a bookmarklet (URL shortening, auto capture of title, link, highlighted text & special char support) it also has a 240 character mode.
BigTweet has hundreds of users now and has been posting thousands of messages to Twitter.
http://bigtweet.com/
Scott
Sorry Michael, but please let this fail. I can’t stand that gibberish
We hear you and don’t love it either. We designed it to cut out vowels only as a last resort. 140it works best when tweets are 20 or so characters over limit (e.g., replaces “and” with “&”, etc).
I totally agree. I don’t want to think 2 or 3 times trying to figure out what someone is saying. And the beauty of Twitter is that it’s teaching us how to be concise.
Neat idea – should be a feature in Twitter labs. You know where I can customize my Twitter experience – oh wait that’s only in Gmail; darn!
Interesting microsoft is turned into $msft
We convert company names into their StockTwits ticker to both shorten them and help make tweets more useful to the financial community.
congrats Michael, you wrote an article that doesn’t suck and is actually useful…there’s hope for u yet!
hahaoh wait, Michael didn’t write it…figures
I’m still not buying your dvds.
He is fucking spammer!!!!!
This will scare teachers so much
Meh. If it doesn’t fit in 140, say less or rephrase.
If you want to get the most bang for your buck, output gzip (or bzip2) in your tweet. Now someone make 140gzip.com please.
Good article but I feel the service is a bit pointless. The whole idea of Twitter is to maximize your message in 140char or less. Why stack another service on top of it? It’s just one more bullshit thing for us to keep track of.
Good in concept, but I’ll stick to my 140 chars, k thanks.
-James
Try http://140pl.us.
shrunk only 1st 3 wrds in opera but I think it’s error from 140it
Rur-Roh
We’ve noticed an error and are working on getting it fixed.
We are having an issue with special characters and are fixing it.
can you roundtrip (e.g., convert back if user on reading end also has the addon?). would be a funny way to play the google translate and back game. add in T9 decoding, too!
Having it be a bookmarklet is what makes it useful, otherwise its not.
Now, if only Tweetdeck would add in this feature….
We’ve become pretty big Chrome users, one of the reasons we were so focused on the bookmarklet. Actually TweetDeck does have a similar feature using TweetShrink’s API.
So that’s what that little button is for
LOL michael, good because if I see you order them, I’ll refund you ASAP…you wouldn’t make it as a penny stock day trader, u work too hard and are already too rich, my DVDs really are for poor people who would love to make a few hundred/thousand
Aren’t you supposed to be on vacation enjoying life?
Then they should publish get-rich-quick dvds! Seems to be more profitable than penny stock trading for at least one guy, eh Tim?
Am I right? I’ll be here all week. Tip your waitresses.
How about the opposite: A web service to “uncrunch” IM-Speak into correct English?
We are thinking about it. If we do release a version of this based on our data, people will think of us as having released a virus and then offered a vaccine.
I like the URL shrinking (which Twhirl does nicely for me, too), but the SMS texting style conversion is absolute appalling. I love that the 140 characters make people think about shortening their updates before they send them off. This is a good extra step to reconsider what you wrote. This just makes updates gibberish and drives another nail in the coffin of the average reading age.
Anyone of my followers who resort to using 140it will be instantly unfollowed.
If you can’t say it in 140, then you shouldn’t say it. There’s an art to figuring out the right words to say it more succinctly, shortening the words is cheating.
Call me a word or Twitter snob, but leave the text speak to the kids.
So very true. I’m not being snobbish either, but half the fun of twitter is the game of saying what I want to say in the bite-size 140chars we’ve all got and deciphering others in return.
This seems rather pointless… sure trying to get 250 chars into 140 might cause excessive strain, but there are some helpful and easy shortcuts that you don’t think of that 140it can help with… a blanket rule about hating shortcuts doesn’t make sense…
should I be concerned that you both use contractions in your comments? or use the numerals ‘140′ instead of “one hundred and forty” — these are among the useful, things that 140it just makes thoughtless…
hey man I jst cnt blv tht your txt doesn’t fit in2 the twitter 140 character limit.. I mean who’d ramble on like that 4 a twitter feed? rly?
Or you know… make multiple tweets.
Cld pls some1 mks the ppst, trnsfrmng ths hds ’shortcut’ wrds in2 lgbl prs?
Mm, sorry:
Could please someone makes the opposite, transforming this hideous ’shortcut’ words into legible prose ?
I think you mean:
Child plus somefirst marks the poopiest, WTF those hands ’shortcut’ awards in2nd umbilical pears.
you see my point?
I won’t be using this, I actually like having to figure out how to make my thought fit into the 140 character limit. Kind of like Twitter sudoku, only easier.
Makng ppl fit teknolgy vs othr way round sux
That shit is hard to read
It’s the first sign that the machines are taking over. Another example is people writing and structuring websites to fit the google search algorithm.
Why don’t these geniuses just convert the 140 bytes into compiled byte code. Just think of the compression advantages.
0111010001011011001001
Ah ha ha ha! How awesome. You’re chasing your tails!
try out the twitter im. developed over the weekend
. works with gtalk, yahoo and aim. can’t post updates for now.
http://itsfrost...t.com/twitterim
140it has been added to the Twitter Applications Database @ Twitdom
http://twitdom.com/140it/
awesome! we’ve devolved from blogging to microblogging to nanoblogging (a la adocu) to picoblogging.
I thought the whole point behind Twitter was that if you can’t tweet it within 140 characters, it ain’t worth tweetin’.
But if 140it could aLsO tRaNsFoRm My TwEeT iNtO aLtErNaTiNg CaPs, ThEn It WoUlD jUsT bE tHe BeSt.
It makes ‘opposite’ -> ‘ppst’
omitting vowels is not the only way to shrink the text guys.
I understand that you make multiple runs through the text, and only change the known words in the first run. eg ‘to->2′, ‘for->4′
Check if there are words with vowels in the middle of the word, change those words after that.
but remember–>
- DO NOT OMIT the vowels in a word if these are at the start of the word.
That’s a good point. We only omit vowels as a last resort but perhaps worth changing algorithm to avoid words that start with a vowel.
Y so much delay in bringout this tool? It husd have been in existence when twitter started in the first place itself.
oh come on – business model anywhere in sight !?!! are all these coders just altruistic?
This was just a weekend project for us. We spent our full time working on Yipit (http://www.yipit.com), a new local search engine for New York which has a business model.
I like it, i’ll probably use it. Its not the worst idea in the world…
Must explore this today! Thank you Techcrunch.
http://stuckinf...es.blogspot.com
I believe this only works for the english language…. Internationalization FAIL.
not as good as:
http://tweetshrink.com/
~zaf
http://twitter.com/zafarali
I love this service. Great work, guys! The bookmarklet is the difference maker between this and tweetshrink. Fantastic
I’ll keep editing my content to its essence, and using real words. We must fight against gibberish!
This will kill the twitter search. If I type Usability and it converts to Usblty how would anyone search for the term Usability?
how about this:
usability OR usblty
I heard from a good source that Twitter is in discussions with General Dynamics to bolster its crime scene correlation program offering.
I don’t think this is a great idea for the evolution of Twitter. If you can’t fit it within 140 characters, use your blog instead. There’s no point in typing that much into your twitter feed. Like someone stated, it’ll make search.twitter.com a pain to use since everything will be abbreviated. Condensing urls make sense, not an entire tweet; it’ll be like reading pager text all over again.
This would have made a perfect Mozilla Ubiquity script if they put a little more effort into it.
not the greatest fan of yipit (yet) seems a bit too narrow (http://web-poet...09/02/03/yipit/) — but totally digging 140it
If you prefer to keep your vowels in your Twitter tweets but still find times to shorten your message, check this out: http://txtn.us
This site has tools to reduce text without compromising vowels, syllables or word structure. It uses special characters like Latin ligatures that look like multiple letters together. There are also some other tools like a url shortener, the shortest on the web, fun ways to turn your text upside down, backwards. I’ll try running this paragraph through it.
Says it reduced the text by 31 characters. Some look kind of goofy but overall not too bad.
This site ㏊s tᅇʪ to reduŒ text without ㏇m㏚omis㏌g voweʪ, syᄔabᇉs or word structure. It ㎲es special c㏊racte₨ like Lat㏌ ligatures t㏊t lᅇk like multipᇉ ᇉtte₨ together. There are aʪo some other tᅇʪ like a url shortener, the shortest on the web, fun ways to turn your text u㎰ide down, bac㎾ards. I’ᄔ try runn㏌g this ㎩ragra㏗ thro㎍h it.
Ah ha ha ha! How awesome. You’re chasing your tails!