APEX Developer

TweetShrink is a simple app with a single job to do: to shrink your long tweets down to 140 characters or less. As noted by it’s developers, “[the service aims to help] shave those few extra letters off a tweet…without having to actively edit [the] tweet or [change] the…basic readability.”

Finding the Easiest Way to Shrink Tweets

It’s possible you may go out to a web interface to shorten a long URL (though bookmarklets are fairly common these days), but stepping outside of the Twitter web interface or your favorite Twitter client to use an app that shortens a message to 140 characters just doesn’t seem likely. If it takes that long to do it, you might as well just edit the message yourself.

However, the TweetShrink developers were already thinking a step ahead by publishing a TweetShrink API that will allow any application to make system calls and perform the same function as the web interface. Since launching that API, TweetShrink has now been integrated in TweetDeck, one of the most popular desktop clients for Twitter, which makes shrinking long tweets very easy to do.

Though some of your tweets may end up looking like chatroom speak or a 14 year-old’s text message after shrinkage, the real goal is to prevent the user from having to edit tweets down to size. After all, tweets should flow easily from your fingertips and not require you to spend a lot of time finessing the wording. That’s part of why this stuff is called microblogging. It should be quick and painless.

You can find a real-time stream of shrunken tweets on the bottom of the TweetShrink website.

Have a Question About TweetShrink?

You can follow @tweetshrink on Twitter or hit up their Get Satisfaction page to fulfill any support questions you may have.