Scripting News: Enough with shortened URLs (Scripting News)
sameasiteverwas
· 4 months ago
Why does Twitter hate the Web?
Seriously. Every tech journalist should be asking them this question. They're undermining one of the foundational principles of the Web -- that, as Sir Tim himself put it more than a decade ago, "Cool URIs Don't Change" -- just to preserve a completely arbitrary limitation in their application.
Seriously, journos. Ask Ev and Biz and the rest the question.
Why does Twitter hate the Web?
J
· 4 months ago
Dude, you were one of the people involved in the design and rollout of bit.ly -- this all comes off as very weird. Why would you have encouraged the creation and adoption of a URL shortener if you're so negative on them?!?
Can you provide a little more context for this? I did some searching and haven't come up with a reason for a change of opinion re: bit.ly. Thanks
lavrusik
· 4 months ago
Amen. I like the second option better just because it gives users some control, though not everyone might be able to do their own hosting. Either way, I agree that Twitter needs to take on this responsibility. They sure do have their work cut out for them.
greglinch
· 4 months ago
Ditto on the second option. It's possible to do that now, but it hasn't been widely adopted:
People who don't have hosting space would be an issue, but there are workarounds. One, with a business model, could be to offer mini-hosting plans just for that purpose. Maybe a $1/month? Not bad for peace of mind.
AndrewBurton
· 4 months ago
Having written my own in an afternoon, I agree, it's ridiculously easy to build your own.
Mario Valente
· 4 months ago
I'm sure you are all aware of a short url standard proposal:
Let me clarify, using Twitter Friendly Links in conjunction with other plug-ins. I haven't heard of it on my initial search on plugins that generate custom urls using personal domains - but will look into it. thanks for the heads up.
William Mougayar
· 4 months ago
bit.ly has ulterior motives to just "shortening" the URL. They are collecting stats on "passed links" and building meta-data on the content of these links. That's what's driving their business model, not just the shortening part which is a means to that end. That's why I'm not too optimistic about that sort of universal collaboration. bit.ly is in essence building the equivalent of a Google for search, but focused on the hotness of links based on how many times they are being passed. Twitter is indirectly conniving with them.
strick
· 4 months ago
Dave sounds the toll too early. Just because tr.im didn't make it, doesn't mean it's a bad idea. The evolution of the net is littered with debris. Give it time. Let others build where tr.im fell. And for the record, I am fine with 140 character tweets.
ralphhempel
· 4 months ago
Wasn't the cell network SMS size limit the original reason for the 140 character limit on Twitter in the first place?
dave
· 4 months ago
shorten the urls for sms only then
ralphhempel
· 4 months ago
My point is this - what is using twitter as the delivery agent buying you besides more or less free bandwidth? If the point is engineering a news delivery system, is it not possible to do that without the crazy limit on character size? Can delivery via Twitter on the original target hardware (a phone) not plug into the instant news delivery/creation you actually want?
peteaustin
· 4 months ago
Short urls are useful in many situations, not just Twitter. So Twitter is neither the problem, nor the solution. It's just the technology in today's spotlight.
AAfter Search
· 4 months ago
We really need an 'Internet like' solution for short URL and Twitter services.. Until then, enter your long url at AAfter search box, and we create two fail-safe short urls...
bootload
· 4 months ago
"... It's time for Twitter to add a simple feature to their platform that allows users to attach a URL of arbitrary length to a message, without using up any of the 140 characters ..."
You would have thought this have been attempted before now. It exposes the *optomised* mindset of the developers. The idea of pointing a twit comment somewhere is the basis of html, ahref (comment + url = link) and it's a pretty simple concept to understand. Make what users want, but do a good job of it. Software is after all an artificial construct. You don't have to mess up the simple interface, just accept "http://foo.bar/very/large/url/that/points/to/somewhere" into the box & strip it out, save it as a link & represent the link with the message or next to it.
Joe Moreno
· 4 months ago
Dave,
Adjix has been allowing people to point their sub-domains at us since we launched a year ago. Plus, you extolled some of our greatest features this past Spring: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/04/27/adj...
- Joe
teachj
· 4 months ago
Honestly, it's not that hard. All they have to do is allow users to create a link in their Tweet just like any other HTML document - say like blogs. You highlight the text and then click on the link tool and embed your link. Lots of people already know how to do it. They could even have a short video how to on their main Twitter page.
J
· 4 months ago
Everyone who tries to say how easy it is to create a link is missing the fact that Twitter has a 140-character limit for a reason -- SMS messaging limits. If you want to create and store actual, long URLs in tweets, then you're going to have to count every character against that 140-char limit... because while on a webpage/iPhone client/whatever, it's easy to hyperlink a word, but via SMS you have to send the whole link for the recipient to know what the heck you're talking about.
So, a lot of people need to reframe how they're thinking about this: how do you allow for the *entire* context of a tweet to be represented in 140 pure-text characters? No HTML, no hyperlinks, nothing else -- just pure text.
dave
· 4 months ago
You can shorten the URL as it goes thru the SMS gateway, otherwise it stays native length
Nic
· 4 months ago
Yep. I work for a big news producer . We got worried about URL shorteners so built our own for when we need to do this. It gives us control over statistics, service up-time and everything. We started it before your comments about the NYTimes, but you spurred us on. The tr.im situation has made us realise our wisdom - and yours. thanks go to you for having helped guide us.
reiver
· 4 months ago
Dave, you said... "It's time for Twitter to add a simple feature to their platform that allows users to attach a URL of arbitrary length to a message, without using up any of the 140 characters."
The problem with that is that the 140 character limit is there because Twitter was designed to work with SMS text messaging on mobile phone. And with SMS text messaging you have a 140 character limit for international text messages. And thus Twitter has a 140 character limit because international SMS text messaging has a 140 character limit.
Timothy Post
· 4 months ago
Su.pr allows you to use your own domain to shorten URLs from your own blog. While this is an excellent first step, Dave is right, the time has come for short URL companies to enable users to create a CNAME for a sub-domain, which they already own and then use that sub-domain as the base domain in the short URL. While this would obviously increase the number of characters for most "custom short URLs" it would provide a measure of safety.
Additionally, I would like to see short URL companies give users the opportunity to export/import a simple file which lists all the short URLs and all the external destination URLs. Dave, I'm sure that you know how this export/import option can be implemented technically.
I also never liked the tendency for link shorteners to obscure where you're going, and created http://lnk.nu to try to mitigate that (shortened links contain the original domain name).
But the time of link shorteners has passed. The web is built on URLs, let's keep it that way.
kdawson
· 4 months ago
Another way to mitigate the immediate damage would be for twitter to implement a "bulk edit the shortened URLs in my tweets" feature. It can be entirely back-end: go through my tweets, resolve any tr.im URL you encounter, rewrite it in the shortener of my choice. (If they allowed this kind of thing via the API, they would have to allow editing individual tweets, and I can see why they don't want to do that.) But of course the right long-term solution is to move away from reliance on URL shorteners.
Robert Safuto
· 4 months ago
The fact that Twitter forces shortened URLs on users is reason enough to limit use of the service to communication that doesn't have much value. How about a little choice for users? The character limit is 140. Fine. But I should have the option of all 140 characters being used in a url. Instead Twitter shortens urls automatically using Bit.ly. Dave is right. Enough. If the people who publish the content want to make short, pretty urls available to visitors then they should do that. But other services should not get to decide to make the link shorter to satisfy some arbitrary standard created to suit the particular service.
J
· 4 months ago
Robert, I have no idea how you post to Twitter, but Twitter does *not* auto-shorten all URLs; there are literally thousands of present examples to show otherwise:
My understanding is that Twitter only shortens a URL if it's over 30 characters long.
Robert Safuto
· 4 months ago
I frequently use Twitter. And Twitter auto-shortens URLs using Bit.ly. It's a fact. In fact, just to make sure I just posted a Tweet from the Twitter web interface that you can see here.
Robert, no offense, but we're saying the same thing -- you're ignoring the last sentence of my comment, "My understanding is that Twitter only shortens a URL if it's over 30 characters long." As your link is 85 characters long, it was shortened. Were it 30 characters long, Twitter would not have shortened it.
dave
· 4 months ago
He's going to say he's not ignoring and then where do we go?
This is a very small issue. You guys should resolve it via email. Please.
Dave
Robert Safuto
· 4 months ago
Actually I did ignore (unintentionally) the last sentence of the comment. That's my bad. I did not know that the Twitter cut off was 30 characters. Even so, I think that Twitter should give their users the option to not shorten URLs (of any length) if users don't want them to be shortened.
Rui
· 4 months ago
Enough with tiny URLs! I am tired of being rick roll'd!!
All Comments
Seriously. Every tech journalist should be asking them this question. They're undermining one of the foundational principles of the Web -- that, as Sir Tim himself put it more than a decade ago, "Cool URIs Don't Change" -- just to preserve a completely arbitrary limitation in their application.
Seriously, journos. Ask Ev and Biz and the rest the question.
Why does Twitter hate the Web?
http://www.google.com/search?q=create+your+own+...
People who don't have hosting space would be an issue, but there are workarounds. One, with a business model, could be to offer mini-hosting plans just for that purpose. Maybe a $1/month? Not bad for peace of mind.
http://sites.google.com/a/snaplog.com/wiki/shor...
-- MV
I don't believe it depends on 3rd party shorteners, more like just creating temporary redirect urls using your domain.
I just couldn't work it to post directly to Twitter, must be a plugin incompatibility issue I haven't explored yet.
Until then, enter your long url at AAfter search box, and we create two fail-safe short urls...
You would have thought this have been attempted before now. It exposes the *optomised* mindset of the developers. The idea of pointing a twit comment somewhere is the basis of html, ahref (comment + url = link) and it's a pretty simple concept to understand. Make what users want, but do a good job of it. Software is after all an artificial construct. You don't have to mess up the simple interface, just accept "http://foo.bar/very/large/url/that/points/to/somewhere" into the box & strip it out, save it as a link & represent the link with the message or next to it.
Adjix has been allowing people to point their sub-domains at us since we launched a year ago. Plus, you extolled some of our greatest features this past Spring:
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/04/27/adj...
- Joe
So, a lot of people need to reframe how they're thinking about this: how do you allow for the *entire* context of a tweet to be represented in 140 pure-text characters? No HTML, no hyperlinks, nothing else -- just pure text.
native length
"It's time for Twitter to add a simple feature to their platform that allows users to attach a URL of arbitrary length to a message, without using up any of the 140 characters."
The problem with that is that the 140 character limit is there because Twitter was designed to work with SMS text messaging on mobile phone. And with SMS text messaging you have a 140 character limit for international text messages. And thus Twitter has a 140 character limit because international SMS text messaging has a 140 character limit.
Additionally, I would like to see short URL companies give users the opportunity to export/import a simple file which lists all the short URLs and all the external destination URLs. Dave, I'm sure that you know how this export/import option can be implemented technically.
I also never liked the tendency for link shorteners to obscure where you're going, and created http://lnk.nu to try to mitigate that (shortened links contain the original domain name).
But the time of link shorteners has passed. The web is built on URLs, let's keep it that way.
http://twitter.com/freddieoconnell/statuses/328...
http://twitter.com/fraying/status/3272439380
http://twitter.com/hamuella/statuses/3289937745
My understanding is that Twitter only shortens a URL if it's over 30 characters long.
http://twitter.com/robsafuto/status/3297898104
That tweet was less than 140 characters and included the original url http://blogs.reuters.com/small-business/2009/08... which was automatically shortened by Twitter to a bit.ly link.
This is a very small issue. You guys should resolve it via email. Please.
Dave