Feature Request: Compress My Tweets

OK, I’m only half joking here, but I’m surprised no one has wired up an app to Twitter that lets you pass compressed/zipped text messages via twitter so you can send messages longer than 140 characters. The community should agree on a convention, for example, let’s say whenever a tweet begins with #ZT: (for zipped tweet), this app would assume the remaining 136 characters were a compressed text string.

Then apps could automagically compress / decompress the characters following the #ZT: , which would then enable tweets much longer than 140 characters since text compresses pretty well. Sure, you’d see a bunch of garbage text strings passing through your twitter stream when folks you follow choose to use this convention, but that would part of the fun of it, since only insider geeks would know what they would need to do to follow those (literally) cryptic conversations.

Has anyone out there built this? Seems like it would be pretty simple to do…