I wanted to give Twitterrific another shot, but I have really gotten quite friendly with Tweetburner over the last little while, and the former application lets Twitter use tinyurl for your URLs. Until either Twitterrific lets users choose to use Twurl — or maybe Twitter does — I wrote a quick AppleScript to use as a Quicksilver plugin. Invoke the script, give it the URL and it will put into your clipboard the twurled version, which you can paste in Twitterrific (or wherever else you want).

Script is here.

The long version:

• The script goes in ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions/
• I have it set as a trigger, so that when I invoke ctrl + opt + cmd + / it pops up with “process text…” as its action. Just paste the URL you want twurled in the third pane.
• If your clipboard does not have the twurled version, you may have network problems. The script needs to access Tweetburner’s API to perform the conversion. Of course, if you are experiencing increased network latency or Tweetburner is down/slow, it may take slightly longer. My tests were all under a second for the response, but give it two or three at most.

Hope you find this useful.

P.S. I know I have said before that sites such as tinyurl or twurl are a pretty bad idea in the long run. However, as per my original argument, short-lived links are useful for a certain category of media, such as IM or Twitter.