After I realized the reasons behind Twitter's 140 character limit, I started to think if one can express anything within 140 chars. Its difficult, and for the same reason, people use services that let them tweet more than 140 chars (with a link to the service). I have also observed people trying to use SMS lingo to cram their words into 140 chars. I thought it would be nice to have a service that shortens your tweets.

I wrote up Twitlyt (http://www.twitlyt.com).

The algorithm is based on the assumption that, as long as the crammed word sounds like the actual word, it is comprehensible. I have used Python's Fuzzy library to generate soundex codes of each of the words in a sentence, then, I removed vowels from the actual words till I get the shortest substring(?) of the actual word that shares the same soundex code with the actual word.

Right now, it handles URLs and mentions. Let me know what you guys think about it.