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The other day, I posted a handful of fairly complex and confusing tweets. Well, at first glance they were confusing, but when explored, they begin to make sense. Inspired by a peculiar element in the new United States Cyber Command logo (not specifically the design), I dug a little deeper to find out what exactly was going on.

The logo itself has a sequence of seemingly random letters and numbers. This message can be decrypted using MD5. The online encrypter and decrypter can be found here. I found it appropriate to experiment with this method of encoding resulting in a series of 4 tweets. They go something like this so play along…

The Tweets

“I am going to have a series of tweets (4) that will probably be the most complex sequence of tweets ever. Try to follow along…”

Explanation

Tweet #1 only included the song lyrics. Tweet #2 contained no encoded information.

Tweet #3 is where things began to get complex because it included a series of encryptions embedded within each other (Red, Dark Gray and Yellow). Only with a short sequence of letters and numbers, I was able to include a significant amount of information.

Confusing yes; awesome yes. The illustration above tries to make better sense of what’s happening with my tweets and how the information is being embedded.

Tweet #4 didn’t really have anything to do with the information.

Summary

I guess the whole purpose of this exploration is showing that a huge amount of information can be encoded in a sequence of only 30-40 characters. This means that you can tweet a message way longer than the 140 characters Twitter allows. Now, I’ll admit it’s not the most efficient or practical means of getting your message across (especially with applications such as TwitLonger), but it is much more fun.

This entire post:

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