FYI, the 140-character limit is enforced by Twitter’s web interface, but not its underlying mechanism. I recently added Twitter support to some applications I produce, and was surprised to find the API let me publish tweats 300+ characters long, and they fully appeared to those following the target account.
I suspect that this support is accidental, and, hence, temporary.
I agree.
Also, while I agree that there is a big benefit to having twitter limit to 140 characters there’s a case that they would have been better off excluding URLs from the count.
They are collecting immense amounts of links that people consider hot yet, Twitter has to do a lot of processing to get actual URLs.
Yeah, I noticed your “patented” formula. I’m actually please to see you talk about Twitter madness like this.
tl;dr 
BTW, on a similar note, you number-based archive URLs really suck. You should have the date and the post title in there.
I always thought Google should start their own… they should buy http://ggl.it
My reCaptcha was “irom tapping”… so of course I tried “penis tapping” and it worked 
I love reCaptcha.
I FULLY agree regarding the strange media hype. There seems to be a mysterious PR agency that it is capable to do that. Also, any blurb out of the press department by Apple, Microsoft, Google and SecondLife (in the past) is recycled in ANY possible manner daily. That is actually one of the reasons why I am tired of many “news” sources. News are not news if they are not new. sigh
Yeah and I wonder how does this affect the PageRank of a webpage? Since lot of shorten URL now point to the actual URL and no URL points to the shorten URL does it changes the page rank?