TwitJacker Lets You Tweet into Other Accounts

There are a number of third-party Twitter tools that allow you to, as they say, Tweet longer. In other words, they let you go beyond the Twitter prescribed 140 character count. These services will put your full tweet on a web page or break them into multiple tweets. Decent solutions, but now a couple of research students at University Principal have launched a new service that should transform overly-long Tweets forever: TwitJacker.

Like those other services, TwitJacker allows you to go well beyond the 140 character limit—in fact there is no limit. However, TwitJacker posts every 140 characters after the first 140 to someone else's Twitter account.

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Grad students Pahil Smith and April Terwilliger built the service last year, but only moved out of beta today. "We had quite a few technical and legal hurdles to clear before we could release TwitJacker into the wild," Smith told PCMag, "but now we have the clearances and servers to support the necessary Twitter API calls."

Here's how TwitJacker works: You post, say, a 420 character tweet in to TwitJacker's Web site or use the TwitJacker hashtag at the end of the Tweet in any other Twitter client. The first set of characters lives on your account. The next set of 140 is posted in the account of whoever last posted onto Twitter (the technology uses global time stamps). Subsequent sections are delivered to the next Twitter posters. Eventually, the entire lengthy tweet is out on Twitter.

When asked about the meaning of the name, Smith said, "Isn't it obvious? Your Tweet is hijacking their Twitter account. You, just for a millisecond, take control." Tweets posted by TwitJacker cannot be deleted from any account. "So Tweet much longer, much more carefully," said Smith, laughing.

Terwilliger admits that there are still a few bugs to work out. For instance, they originally wanted to post the Tweet portions to your followers' accounts, but apparently couldn't tap into that part of Twitter's API. "I remember looking at the follow code and finding a comment from, I think, Jack. I thought that was so cool, that I was touching code from the creator. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out where Jack left the follower hooks," explained Terwilliger.

For now, it remains somewhat difficult to recompile the full Tweet since, as Smith noted this week, "You need to be wicked-fast to catch the next few Tweets after your first Tweet portion." In the meantime, the TwitJacker execs suggest using Twitter's search tools to find all of your Tweet.