Software Testing Blog

The Twitter bird has been seen a lot more than the Fail Whale in the past few month — a testament to the company’s investments in infrastructure. But now, a third species has jumped into the Twitter spotlight: the bug.

And while this particular bug has since been squashed by Twitter’s engineers, it’s still an interesting defect. As all of the major new media heavyweights noted, this Twitter bug briefly enabled the brevity-challenged among you to stretch your legs and break free from the shackles of 140 characters. To put it more plainly, let’s bring in Alexia Tsotsis (@alexia) from TechCrunch:

The Twitter bug which has left many befuddled is exploiting a length limit flaw in the new t.co URL shortener, allowing users to tweet out non-URL links of outrageously more than 140 characters

If you’d like to reproduce the effect, and it seems to be catching, you can visit http://twitter.com/share?text=&url=yourtext, add whatever you want in place of “yourtext,” copy and paste your new t.co URL to Twitter and long tweet away.

Update: Looks like the nimble engineers at Twitter have disabled the feature within the hour this post went up, much to everyone’s dismay. Scripting News’ Dave Winer went so far as to create a web app for the Fat Tweets.

For those of you who follow Twitter (sorry, couldn’t resist), check out the entire TechCrunch article, as well as Mashable’s take.