It was revealed yesterday that a bug in Twitter would allow enterprising individuals to send Tweets longer than 140 characters.
The bug was first exploited in the Twitter Development Talk Google Group when Chris White gave a step-by-step account of how to allow for the new Tweet length.
The process was simple, visit http://twitter.com/share?url= using Firefox and then put your Tweet in after the “?url=” section of the URL and click enter.
The users Tweet box will then show the http://t.co/ shorted URL, click on the tweet button and your full length message will now be sitting in your Twitter account.
Just a quick note, the message will show in it’s entirety on the website, but not via third party Twitter applications.
There appears to be no length restriction with TenhoMania publishing the first chapter of Genesis from the Hebrew Bible in it’s entirety, that’s more than 3,000+ characters.
The bug has been fixed, but it just shows how a simple attempt at hacking the Twitter system can be achieved, it wasn’t exactly rocket science but allowed for a very simple and effective work around to the 140 character limit.
I have to give it up to Twitter as well, they went on the forum and thanked White for his work in exposing the bug, it’s always nice when a company gives a developer credit for helping better their system.
