

Of URL shorteners and the neutrality thereof - olefoo
http://www.google.com/buzz/dclinton/JKoWPTAAyvw/More-thoughts-on-URL-shorteners-This-post-explores

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pierrefar
All very excellent points, and I'd like to add one more: URL shorteners came
into existence because of a need in the market. Removing this need will pretty
much kill all shorteners. All articles on this topic I've seen miss this point
entirely. They dive into why URL shorteners are bad but ignore why they're
here, i.e. how they provide real benefits to their users.

Some history:

1\. TinyURL was started because emails had a character limit per line
(Campaign Monitor suggests 65 characters, but it's more than that:
[http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2075/update-
recomme...](http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2075/update-recommended-
width-for-t/)).

2\. When Twitter came along, there was a massive need to squeeze in a URL in a
small space, and tinyurl.com is just too long. At the same time, 2-letter
ccTLDs became very easily accessible to the average hacker, and the market
exploded.

IMHO, this is all Twitter's fault. They should have seen the massive usage of
URL shorteners early on and created their own or changed the way the 140-char
limit is calculated. t.co is coming late, but better late than never.

The final need in the market is analytics. Social media link sharing is mostly
about creating a link on a website you don't own (like Twitter) that points to
another website you don't own (like google.com or nytimes.com or the BBC). How
do you know if anyone cared?

My hope for t.co is that it will have real-time _good_ analytics built in to
help marketers. Otherwise, they'll all keep using bit.ly or Cligs or home-
grown shorteners. This is a genuine need that won't go away for now.

My point is simple: if you don't like URL shorteners, don't just bash them but
fix the underlying cause instead.

Disclosure: I built Cligs and sold it late last year.

~~~
ROFISH
Here's my question: If Twitter is replacing all links with their t.co AND
including the full URL in the API, why doesn't the API just put the full URL
in most "full" versions (web, RSS, API) and only use the shorturl on extreme
bandwidth situations like SMS (or arguably a very compressed mobile API.)

It will break the holy 140 characters, but as you said, the reason for the
shortener is because the 140 limit.

~~~
pierrefar
Having both is very good. Look at what Backtype does with their Twitter search
API. The HTML of each tweet will have its links be:

<a href="FULL_URL">SHORT_URL</a>

I think that's perfect because I know which URL shortener was used and can
follow up if needed (e.g. check the bit.ly analytics).

What you're proposing would support exactly this scenario, and as a marketer
of my web apps myself, I like. But their ToS changes the OP mentioned go
exactly against that, and I don't like.

------
daakus
I understand the need for analytics, but I _think_ most twitter users don't
care about that. Couldn't twitter just not count the URL towards the 140
characters? (Yes, more complicated than that in order to prevent spam or
whatever, and yes backward compatibility sucks. But basic auth is being killed
too.)

~~~
ElbertF
That would break the SMS functionality, which is why they limited posts to 140
chars in the first place.

------
secos
check out <http://mug.gd> the eevil URL shortener

------
swombat
_This post explores the phenomenon of URL shorteners, discusses the potential
impact of the recent announcement by Twitter (a favorite site of mine) to
rewrite all links shared through the service, and makes a few specific
recommendations on how to improve on these implementations._

What a god-awful way to start a post. Nothing of interest to hook the mind.

 _What is a URL shortener?_

 _You've all seen short URLs before — the links to tinyurl.com, bit.ly, wp.me,
etc., recently popularized as a workaround to fit more content into smaller
spaces, most notably within Twitter's 140 character limits. URL shorteners
work by taking any arbitrary URL (which can contain hundreds of characters or
more) and creating a new URL, typically only a handful of characters plus the
short domain name, and returning a 301 or a 302 HTTP response code that
redirects the browser from the short URL to the original._

More factual pointlessness. There is nothing whatsoever that is _interesting_
in that second paragraph.

 _scrolls down_

3.5 thousand words written in that style? No thanks.

Writing is designed to be read by people. If you have a point, present it
digestibly or keep it to yourself.

~~~
ComputerGuru
I think you've been spoiled by twitter-stlye "articles." 140 characters,
bluntly to the point, with no appreciation for the arts.

~~~
swombat
No. I've been spoiled by articles that justify their existence in the first
few lines, instead of requiring the reader to make a leap of faith and trust
the author with half an hour of their precious time.

Actually, I haven't been spoiled, they're still fairly rare.

