Twitter – How to make a self referential (recursive) tweet on Twitter

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One of the tweets by Notch (MineCraft creator) was as follows:

I love recursion, as seen here: https://twitter.com/#!/notch/status/103165179721814016

I am using the long url format instead of the shortened link but the link redirects to the one mentioned above

How was this accomplished? It is made via the web interface, so I assumed it is just a simple trick with Tinyurl custom links.

Best Answer

I would imagine that there was a slight delay between the Tweet being posted and the TinyURL being created.

TinyURL lets you choose a custom alias so I would think the steps would be:

  • Go to the TinyURL website.
  • Choose a custom alias using letters and numbers. In my case I picked http://tinyurl.com/r3cur510n. It can be anything really, you just need get lucky and make sure the URL has not been used before.

Make TinyURL form

  • Post the tweet on Twitter with the TinyURL link you have thought off.
  • Once the tweet has posted then grab the full URL. Quickly paste this in to the Long URL box and click Make TinyURL

The trick is to not let Twitter auto generate the short URL. I have followed these steps to create a copy of the "recursive" tweet here.

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