The other day, after I tweeted a link to my website, someone replied saying the link was broken. After a couple minutes of investigation, I found out he uses TweetDeck, and that broken link was TweetDeck’s fault.

If you visit @daringfireball’s twitter page on a Mac, you’ll most likely see the ✪ character on all the URLs. If you’re on Windows, there’s a chance you’ll see a square instead. Why? Because that special character is not part of the default system font, so it displays a generic square as an alternative.

Despite not displaying the right character, the link is not affected, because it is converted to the right URL. It’s called a punycode.

TweetDeck, a vastly used Twitter client, simply removes those special characters, it doesn’t even replace them with a generic one, it just removes them. Therefore the URLs don’t work because they are transformed. http://oogle.com is not the same domain as http://google.com, as much as http://df.ws is not the same as http://✪df.ws.

Well TweetDeck displays http://✪df.ws URLs as http://df.ws. Ditch TweetDeck, you cannot rely on a program that transforms links.