UpYourSocial

This is a guest post by Chinmoy Kanjilal.  He is a technology, web2.0 and Linux enthusiast and evangelist. He blogs primarily at Techarraz. You can find him on Twitter @chinmoykanjilal.

Twitter has grown into a powerful microblogging platform and an extremely important tool for bloggers. Twitter lets us market our business in the fastest manner.

One defining characteristic of microblogging is the character limit. Twitter has a limit of 140 characters. This is one of the driving factors behind the popularity of Twitter, as the 140 character limit ensures that the message is filled with great content.

This character limit, although good, can sometimes get in the way of us sending our complete thought.  Now, there are no real ways to send more than 140 characters in Twitter, but there are ways to pack in more content within those 140 characters.

TweetShrink

TweetShrink can shrink tweets by using slang and abbreviations that are common in sms messages.  It works by replacing numbers in words with numeral numbers, and shrinking words like ‘over’ to ‘ovr’, ‘here’ to ‘hre’.

I really like the way it works, because there is very little loss in readability and people can understand the message just by reading it out.

Maxitweet

Maxitweet allows us to tweet more than 140 characters, but in a different way than TweetShrink. Maxitweet allows us to tweet in characters other than standard ASCII characters allowed by the Twitter applications.

Both TweetShrink and MaxiTweet are popular and free services.  The TweetShrink service is popular enough to be included in Seesmic Desktop.  Do you ever find yourself needing to use one of these services?

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