Scripting News - Latest Comments in A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

Re: A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

Mats — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 00:46:07 -0000

It seems like tumblr will not even recognize the shortened URL as an URL in the proposed format. I am messing around to see what it will recognize.

Re: A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

chanux — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 11:20:51 -0000

I always wondered why twitter is not giving this option.

Re: A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

teradome — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 10:03:23 -0000

Agreed. [x](y) is only one character more than the [x|y] format, and it's MUCH more human-readable.
Plus, lots of people already know how to use it.

Re: A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

halwebguy — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 18:29:33 -0000

I find some irony in this, because what we're now talking about is almost a fixed content type, related structures. I meant a great idea, but I hear people calling for standards already :)

Re: A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

Guy Parkinson — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 15:46:00 -0000

I get the feeling what is really wanted is for twitter to add metadata fields to carry entities like links that use valuable character space. All the suggested work-arounds involve adding markup parsing stuff to the twitter service itself and/or clients... Metadata would require parsing, but it would at least exist outside the character stream while remaining a native element of the post... Am I missing the point?

Re: A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

Foomandoonian — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 15:45:08 -0000

There's a lot of good thought going into this, but it doesn't seem likely that Twitter are ever going to incorporate anything like this. I can see Evan putting it in laconi.ca, but Twitter?

That said: if you added a further restriction - that you could just use ONE word as a link, would the following syntax not save you a ton of characters?:

word*bit.ly/abcd

(The * could equally be a pipe) I'm no programmer, so this may cause issues I can't see, but the *, with no blank space either side, would tell Twitter that to the left was the word, and to the right a URI (sans http://).

Re: A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

Todd D. — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 15:36:45 -0000

I prefer the Markdown syntax also. No need to reinvent what has already been invented.

Re: A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

halwebguy — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 15:33:05 -0000

I see what this accomplishes, but don't see the huge benefit. You're still putting the link in the text, so it's still going to count to the 140 character limit. For example, let's say we have a 15 character limit:

This is a great site! http://bit.ly/DMhr
[This\http://bit.ly/DMhr] is a great site!

You'll see the "shorter" one actually takes MORE characters to store. No character limit would apply only to the rendered version, or that break virtually every rule of character limits. I'll admit it's elegant, but it certainly doesn't solve a space problem.

I agree removal of http would help, but that also hurts the ability to recognize a link, of course unless you're back in the [brackets] again. Of course, now, this makes brackets a difficult character to use if you really intend to.

Good try, but I don't think this works.

Re: A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

shiva — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 15:17:22 -0000

Why not abbrieviate supported url shortening services as well.

bit.ly = b
snurl.com = s
etc..

This + dropping http would be huge savings in url shortening.

then the syntax would just be
[text|service shortcut:link id]

eg.
[photo|b:DMhr]

Update: This shortening syntax could be based of a public RESTful service, that any client could use

Re: A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

dave — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 15:10:32 -0000

You could only drop the http:// if it was inside [square|brackets].

Re: A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

dave — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 15:02:33 -0000

You got it baby. If they just had a simple way to attach the equivalent of
Perl dictionaries or Python hash tables or whatever each language calls them
(in Frontier we call them tables) -- arbitrary collections of name-value
pairs -- the Internet would get an instant point upgrade. Not just this
corner of the Internet, the whole damned thing. I've been asking everyone to
do this for years, Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, etc etc. Twitter. Anyone! Do it
-- it will make you rich beyond your wildest dreams. The depression will end
immediately. Obama will win a second term. :-)

Re: A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

kortina — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 19:52:32 -0000

We believe this is an edge case related to some spam issues that we are working on patching today. This should be resolved very soon.

Re: A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

Don — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:11:26 -0000

bit.ly lings are blocked on my work computer. Anyone else have this issue?

tinyurl are not.

Re: A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

Dom — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 10:16:59 -0000

This would only really work if twitter also supported it directly on the web interface. Until then its probably better to stick with is.gd's or bit.ly's built-in postfixes like http://is.gd/fT2s/new-tweet... rather than doing [new tweet link|http://is.gd/fT2s]

Re: A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

dave — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 08:30:10 -0000

Of course to all of it, the latter part especially. Just strip out markup as
it goes through the SMS gateway. Piece of cake.

Re: A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

timo — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 05:05:45 -0000

I trtied it, too. Same result. Strange.

Re: A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

joshua schachter — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 03:59:00 -0000

A UI tweak Twitter could do would be:

You put the anchor text in brackets. Like: 41 people call this [photo] a favorite

As soon as you write [] it adds a field below the 140 char sms, saying, "Link #1". Then the link could be pasted in there.

It's silly to be constrained by the SMS character limit - if you're on a device that only does SMS and not web, you can't follow the link anyway. So split them apart.

Re: A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

amp — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:50:42 -0000

Skimmed the links and I guess it's not meant to do anything, other than provide a little extra info.

Still confused about the use of the word "render" in the post. Rendered where, exactly?

Re: A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

amp — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:46:18 -0000

This isn't working for me either.

Re: A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

karl — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:47:02 -0000

I tried this, and it didn't work, what did I do wrong?

http://twitter.com/kidologi...

Re: A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

kshep — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:43:35 -0000

Except in this case lots of people have already implemented this, i.e. simplified markup for links. Markdown, Textile, every wiki on the planet... everybody comes up with some simple way to represent links like this without needing the "a href" overhead. Which "standard" is this?

Re: A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

Mark Dodge Medlin — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 17:16:14 -0000

Is this just in the idea stage, or is it supposed to be working on Twitter right now? Because from what I can see, it isn't. I tried it in a couple of tweets without success, and in your tweets, Dave, I still see everything within the brackets. In any case, it's a great idea.

Re: A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

ickledot — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 17:12:13 -0000

Please accept this as a fan comment. Tech posts like this often sail straight over my head (and you know it because you provide plenty of non-tech posts for the likes of me). As it happens, I do see the point of putting links into tweets and such even though I don't entirely understand how it works. I'm proud to witness this evolutionary process first hand.

Re: A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

Joey Baker — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 17:10:16 -0000

yes, it might break on SMS… 2 options:
• assume that enough people have smartphones capable of getting around this that you can develop for future tech instead of burdening yourself with outdated technology
• ignore sms links b/c sms isn't really designed for following hyperlinks anyway.

Re: A new way of linking in tweets (Scripting News)

Richard Volpato — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 17:07:35 -0000

Would "compact HTML" help here? See http://webbackplane.com/mar...