Abbreviate: a text-shrinking tool for Twitter

Tweetshrink is a web application designed to squeeze messages longer than 140 characters into a tweet. Personally, I don’t like it. There are a lot of nearly invisible cuts it could make and instead it just cuts out vowels and replaces ‘see’ and ‘to’ with ‘C’ and ‘2’ respectively. Abbreviate is my version. Let’s see how they compare:

Original message: Let's see how well Tweetshrink shrinks this tweet. (50 characters) Tweetshrink version: Let's C how well Tweetshrink shrinks ths tweet. (47 characters) Abbreviate version: Let's see how well Tweetshrink shrinks this tweet. (50 characters)

I should stress that Abbreviate only starts hacking off bits of your message when you actually go over the 140 limit (although you can change the limit if you want). Once you get under 140 characters, it stops messing about. So a very long message would suffer more drastic cuts than an only slightly overlong one.

Let’s try them on a longer message. Here’s a genuine tweet that was stretched over two tweets in my timeline:

Original message: I looked at the Twifficiency website — it doesn't even say what the number means. Who cares what a number is if you don't know what it means? And it needs access to your account. Anyone who knows their Twifficiency score has no right to complain about online privacy ever again. (278 characters) Tweetshrink version: I looked at the Twifficiency website — it doesn't even say wht the number means. Who cares wht a number is if U dont know wht it means? & it needs access 2 yr acct. Anyone who knows their Twifficiency score has no rt 2 complain abt online privacy evr again. (257 characters) Abbreviate version: I looked@the Twifficiency website—it dœsnt even say what the#means.Who cares what a #s if you dont know what it means?& it needs access to your account.Anyone who knows their Twifficiency score has no right to complain about online privacy ever again (246 characters)

Okay, so the Abbreviate version is still too long, but it’s shorter and more readable than the Tweetshrink version, and any of the 18 changes Abbreviate has made to the tweet can be undone immediately with the links in the pink box. Once your tweet fits in the 140 characters you’re allowed, you can either post it using Abbreviate or copy-paste it into another client or the website. It’s all OAuth, of course, so I never see your password, and usernames, hashtags and URLs are all protected and won’t be abbreviated.

Anyhow, have a play with it and let me know if it’s useful and how it could be more useful.