Since then Twitter has become a powerful method to distribute links to cool content. However, with the 160character limit, characters are a premium, so a whole bunch of services were born (bit.ly, goo.gl, etc.) to shorten URL's.

http://www.google.com.au/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=fluffy+bunnies (73 Characters or 45.63% of total tweet) became http://bit.ly/bRajwN (20 Characters or 12.5% of total tweet) a massive saving in tweet length. Why not take it a step further?

Why not remove the need for the "http://"? I mean do we really need to know that we are accessing the Hypertext Transfer Protocol? Google removed the http:// from Google Chrome back in April

By removing "http://" we will be saving seven characters from any tweet that has one link in it (or 4.38% of total tweet). TechCrunch recently reported that Twitter sees 90 million tweets per day with 25% containing links. That equates to 22.5 million links. All those links include "http://" that is 157.5million characters sent every day.

So if we remove it, how would my favorite Twitter software recognize a link? A new tag, hereby christened a linktag;

^

Why ^ ? Well @ and # are already tags. Moving along the keyboard, we can't use $ or % as I assume they are used quite a bit. But ^ is rarely used in text. It also looks like the head of an arrow pointing up, like a link out of the page.

The link tag will replace the 'http://' (7 characters or 4.38% of tweet) with '^' (1 character or .63% of tweet), this will mean that 135 million characters will be removed from tweets every day.