Have you noticed when you try to ‘shorten’ your tweets by using this symbol ‘&‘ as a substitute for ‘and‘ (A.K.A. an ampersand) you run into a problem? Yeah, we’ve noticed it too. We’ve been seeing something like this:

My friend Jason just retweeted his girlfriend and I saw this common problem (sorry guys, it was the first example I noticed!). The ever-elusive ‘ampersand’ somehow mutated into ‘&amp:‘, it kinda’ defeats the purpose since typing out the word only takes 3 of your precious characters… not 5!

So, what’s the solution? What’s causing this hiccup and how can you avoid it? Well, truth be told, there doesn’t seem to be a rhyme-or-reason for this mysterious transformation. I was able to find this blog post on the Twitter support side for developers. It gives some causes but no real answers as to WHY it happens:

Now sometimes we’ve sent tweets using the ‘&’ symbol and they blast into the Twitterverse without a hitch… other times, things aren’t so smooth.

Are you having a similar issue? Have you found a solution? Leave a comment or shoot us a tweet and let us know… just try to preserve your characters and type out A-N-D!