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I got http://9m.no/๐‘‚œเตญ for my daughter's website, but I'm wondering whether this helps shrink character count when used for services like twitter. It's not at all readable, but since it's two (I think) 4-byte unicode characters, will that URL be counted as 13 characters or 21 characters?



Pasting one of those characters in, we see it's counted as one character. However: Twitter replaces all URLs, even shortened ones, with 22-character t.co URLs. Using 9m.no on Twitter is pointless, especially since Twitter displays the original URL for t.co URLs only. Using another shortener, the shortened URL is all that is shown, which isn't very reader-friendly.


Twitter "shrinks" URL's no matter what. My website link is is 11 characters[0], I don't know how shorter it can get.

[0] http://bt.hn


When is a URL shortener not a URL shortener?

http://qntm.org/twit


For a while, years ago, http://cx worked.


Twitter shortens every URL regardless and reserves 23 chars (I believe) for each link in a tweet.


Obviously the correct answer is for Twitter to incorporate this approach.




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