"Previously, most folks used tinyurl.com to make their URLs short and sweet... but lately, some Twits have determined that even tiny URLs waste precious character space, and have been demanding even tinier URLs." - Ontario Emperor

They should apply for the .rl domain space and use u.rl (but now that I've typed this out loud, someone else will snap it up) - Michael W. May

Are one letter domain spaces legal? At some point someone's going to say that a four character URL (counting the period) is too long. - Ontario Emperor

They should ask for browser vendors and to map a one-letter protocol identifier- say, the "w" from "web" - to the http protocol. Another three characters saved! w://u.rl/[identifier] Still 8 wasted characters if I count correctly. Alternatively, they could host their own url shortening service and map it to a special character like "&" or something. Then it would like the @username convention. - Meryn Stol

That is, &linkid would map to something like http://url.twitter.com/linkid - which in turn would redirect to the true url. - Meryn Stol