Sorry for the accidental downvote-- I have a reflex of downvoting people who reply to the wrong comment and I forgot this was my own thread. Sorry. :(
Twitter is doing a character count and doesn't care about bytes-- if it did, it means that tweeting in non-ASCII languages only gets half the characters. That's not exactly fair.
If people like the service, we'll be adding metrics and even allow people to search for tinyarrows that were associated with a particular domain.
It's more of something fun-- we're not trying to change the world or anything. We make a lot of sites/toys and this is just one of the fun ones to share with people.
I'd heard otherwise about the byte count, but I don't have any authoritative knowledge on the matter
We make a lot of sites/toys and this is just one of the fun ones to share with people.
Awesome. There should be more tiny projects. I recall comments on http://tweetbysnailmail.com saying "this startup will fail". They obviously miss the point :)
The fun part aside, are there any real use cases for tweetbymail?
At the peak of .Com days, there was a startup that promised to bridge e-mail and snail mail: one can use their service to email people who don't have an email account or connectivity, and it would be delivered through snail mail.
How do multi-byte Unicode characters work over SMS? Languages that use an average of four bytes per character can only send 35 character messages? I'm not so sure "fair" is really part of the discussion. Twitter still has SMS turned on in some countries that use wide characters, right?
It's not hard at all to do this test yourself, and I've done it. Not sure what the argument is-- Twitter is fine with unicode characters. Are you seeing something different?
Maybe some of the clients or the SMS stuff doesn't like it, but the core site will let you type 140 unicode characters and share that with people.
There is no argument, I'd like to know how they handle it. Since I don't use a language that uses a lot of wide characters, nor do I use twitter via SMS (I barely use my twitter account as it is), I'm interested as to what the experience is.
I'm not sure that's true, at least for Twitter. I just tried tweeting 140 ♥s, and all 140 of them showed up. (And I'm sure my followers now feel very loved)
