

Twitter Switches From TinyURL To Bit.ly - coglethorpe
http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-switches-from-tinyurl-to-bitly-2009-5

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Kadin
Interesting choice of TLD. I can only assume this means they'll be sure to
conform to all relevant Libyan law, since it only takes one court order to
pull their domain registration. (Cf. <http://nic.ly/regulations.php>)

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dryicerx
Every time I hear something about URL shortners, a part of me dies inside.

My Thoughts: Twitter is the main reason for the increase in URL Shortners.
Instead of depending on outside services, Twitter should (must) implement
their own shortning service. Something like !02u389 or ^02u389 that maps to a
real URL. (like their #hastags and @replies)

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axod
Agreed. And if they did roll their own, they could do nice things like hover
over a short url and it'll show you the destination url. That sort of thing is
easier when you're running both parts of the system.

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callahad
The thing is, none of this is necessary. HTML has a built in URL shortener:

    
    
      <a href="http://example.com/long">Short</a>
    

There you go.

Twitter is _already_ parsing URLs out of tweets in order to feed them through
bit.ly. At that point, the length of the URL isn't relevant -- it's been
turned into a single token and pulled from the tweet.

Why don't we just stop there instead of first stopping off at the shortener
before writing our HTML?

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lsb
That doesn't work as a text message.

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bobbyi
If you are in a situation where you can only receive messages via text, then
you aren't able to visit web pages.

So they could replace the urls with "[url]" or somesuch when sending them via
SMS.

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ks
Mobile phones can do both. Not all phones are connected to the internet all
the time, so it would make sense to receive twitter messages using SMS, and
_then_ connect to the net.

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tolmasky
What's particularly silly about all this is that when using the website to
tweet you by definition do _not_ need a URL shortener. You are not allowed to
type more than 140 characters in the input field, so your message is
necessarily already under 140 chars, so the shortening does _nothing_. I find
this particularly frustrating since I have a message with a perfectly legible
URL, hit send, and all of a sudden its a short URL that now one know where it
goes anymore. If it auto shortened your URL as you pasted it in (as opposed to
after hitting reply/send), then it would at least allow to type more, but as
it is, the auto shortening serves no user-purpose.

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Tichy
bit.ly has one drawback: a proliferation of bit.ly URLs pointing to the same
URL, because every user can get an individual abbreviation.

That makes reverse lookups infeasible (get tinyurl for url, search twitter for
tinyurl - see who links to you). At least with tinyurl most abbreviations were
the same.

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axod
Why don't they just make their own? Seems like keeping that data 'in house'
would be wise.

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coglethorpe
"Bit.LY is a portfolio company of Betaworks, which is also an investor in
Twitter"

From the perspective of the investors, they are keeping it "in house" By
pairing work of two investments, they make both a little stronger (well, bitly
a lot stronger).

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axod
Hoping some of the hype of twitter might rub off on bit.ly I'd say if I was
skeptical. Still amazing bit.ly got funded.

~~~
ttacor
Isn't this a libian domain name? Can that country/somebody there take it back
if they want to?

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antirez
> Breaking news from the red-hot world of URL shorteners.

I don't know if the goal of the author was that but after the first sentence
of the article I was laughing like a mad :)

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FlorinAndrei
I just use <http://is.gd/> when twittering. Shorter by one character. ;-)

