For the next few hours or days (or..?) all hell can break loose on Twitter, as a little hole was opened that makes it possible for greater-than-140-character tweets to break out into the wild.

Here's an example of a fat tweet so you can see what it looks like.

And here's a screen shot in case at some point in the future that gets truncated (as it seems likely it will).

Here's how it works.

1. Twitter has a new url-shortener, called t.co.

2. When it displays a tweet with a url that was shortened by t.co, it expands the url, so you get to see the url it is pointing to. That way you know in advance where you're going. This is a good thing, it's one of the nice things about the web that url-shortening screws with.

3. But t.co doesn't check to see that the thing you're shortening is actually a url. You can shorten things that aren't.

4. t.co doesn't have a 140-character limit for urls.

5. So when it shows the full url, it shows as many as were there. Even if there were more than 140, and even if it wasn't a url.

6. Heh.

Update: I whipped up a little web app to show how it works.

 8/14/2010; 7:57:48 PM.   .

Not sure how many miles cause we had an equipment malfunction with EveryTrail, but it was a two-hour ride. Let me tell you where I went.

Rode cross-town on 10th St to 4th Ave, across 14th St, continued on Park Ave, to 65th St, where I turned west. Rode across the park on the car road, not my plan, but it worked out. Then I stopped to take in the view on Central Park West and somehow the trip got stopped. That much was 4.9 miles.

Then I looped south and around the bottom of the park, swung up the east side and rode all the way up to the top of the park. Saw a beautiful swimming pool, huge, and not too crowded. This is where I discovered that I had had the malfunction.

Started up EveryTrail for the second leg. Went across 110th to Riverside Drive. Then headed south, crossed over to the greenway at the boat harbor, then headed south down the usual route. Stopped at the heliport to rest and shoot a video of a helicopter landing.

The second part was 7.1 miles.

Looks like the uncounted part of the trip is almost exactly 4.0 miles.

So the total for the day is: 16.0 miles.

I think I might take it easy tomorrow.

PS: Just noticed Google can send maps to cars now.

 8/14/2010; 1:13:24 PM.   .