Tweeting From the Future: How to Make a Tweet Link to Itself

We saw this in Techmeme CEO Gabe Rivera's Twitter stream a while back and were puzzled and downright confused; his infi-tweet was so meta it hurts. Our first inclination was to believe that Gabe had someone at Twitter set up the nerd magic trick for him, something along the lines of predicting the URL of his next tweet so he could tweet from the future, as it were.

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And so we let it go. But when our co-worker thought we had sent her a lengthened link to the SFWeekly.com homepage this morning, we were reminded of this Ouroboros-inspired tweet and set out to solve it. Our process, below:

1. Hit up a URL shortener site that allows you to customize URL like Bit.ly and Tinyurl. In this case we used Tinyurl because it seemed easiest.
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2. Type in the customized URL field while leaving the long URL input field blank. If you want to keep people guessing for awhile, try to mimic the random assortment of uppercase/lowercase letters and numbers found usually in generated URLs. In this case we used "Yw3BxC", in homage to Rivera's original tweet.

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