
You Say NPR, But On Twitter We Say n.pr - Inside NPR.org Blog - gr366
http://www.npr.org/blogs/inside/2010/03/you_say_npr_but_on_twitter_we.html
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gr366
It's interesting to see the wave of URL shorteners spawned by the constraints
Twitter put on its payload. Is the thinking that it's safer for individual
organizations to have their own shortener rather than rely on the bit.ly's and
tinyurl's of the world because in the future they'll be able to change where
they point (e.g. if they adopt a new CMS with different URL scheme)?

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lmkg
It's also about branding and imaging. First, NPR gets its name out there more
by always having it attached to the URL. Second, I'm much more likely to click
an n.pr link that was passed along to me third-hand because I know it belongs
to NPR, whereas I tend not to click bit.ly links because I have no idea where
they link to. Another benefit is that if they own the link, they can track it.

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KWD
At first I was not thinking the branded url shortening would be that big of a
deal, but I admit I like seeing them. I don't have a problem with bit.ly links
since I use tweetdeck to unshorten them before following them, but it's nice
to know the target up front in the tweet.

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mrshoe
Interesting that they chose to save 3 characters on their short URLs via the
tiny domain name, but are wasting 4 by using only numeric characters in their
story slugs.

Nine numeric characters provide for a possible set of 1 billion unique story
IDs. You can get roughly the same size set with five alpha numeric characters
(even more if you toss in a couple of symbol characters).

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sjs382
Any whether they're going to be using the rel="shorturl", rev="canonical" or
some other standard?

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sjs382
ah. seems like they're going the youtu.be and amzn.com route of just modifying
the arguments on existing urls.

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alayne
Now you have three problems. The fundamental problem is SMS.

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sern
It might seem like Twitter's length limit is due to SMS but it's actually not.

Twitter's limit is 140 Unicode characters, which is subtly different from
SMS's limit of 140 bytes (160 7-bit characters or 70 UTF-16 characters).

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gr366
I was under the impression that they reserved 20 7-bit characters for
usernames in @replies, which would suggest that it is still limited due to
SMS, no?

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yosh
Yeah, but tweets aren't limited to the GSM 7-bit character set, so if you
tweet in say, Russian, 140 characters is too much, because the _whole_ message
needs to be encoded using 2-byte characters.

Twitter's limitation is based on thinking around SMS, but it doesn't actually
match up to real world SMS, because they didn't think through all the
international language considerations. It's pretty botched up.

See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=660986>

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gommm
I think that whatever the original reason to limit tweets to 140 characters,
it's become such a part of their identity that it would be foolish to change
it...

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metamemetics
<http://www.to>

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chrischen
or just <http://to./>

So yea, someone should tell NPR that.

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ggrot
Please make it stop.

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Zev
Why? This URL shortener has a clear relation to the full URL. And its not like
NPR will be going anywhere, anytime soon.

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sjs382
And if the shortener disappears, the content it is 301'd to likely will
disappear, too.

