
Interesting Twitter Hashbang Bug - edent
http://shkspr.mobi/blog/index.php/2012/05/interesting-twitter-hashbang-bug/
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p4bl0
This is not relevant, has nothing to do with the hashbang, and is not really a
bug. It's an SEO feature. Most websites do this, including big names like
Amazon for instance: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Ultimate-Hitchhikers-Guide-
Galaxy/...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Ultimate-Hitchhikers-Guide-
Galaxy/dp/0345453743/) is the same as <http://www.amazon.com/dp/0345453743>
(and also the same as <http://www.amazon.com/The-Holy-Bible/dp/0345453743>).

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statictype
This doesn't really seem like a bug to me. It's like permalinks of the form
/a/b/434-some-text-representation-of-object-434 (or like stack overflow does:
/a/b/434/some-text )

It's purely cosmetic and meant for search engines (as noted in the article)
and easy readability.

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gibybo
I suspect Twitter is fully aware of this and decided it didn't matter when
designing it. It's a fairly common pattern to make URLs more readable. I do it
intentionally on a couple of my sites as well.

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hcedric
Of course it is a bug. The tweet id doesn't belong to the username in the url.
It should return a Page not found error.

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scotth
Why do two lookups when you can do one? Keep in mind this is an edge case.

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hcedric
No lookup required, you load the tweet with its id then compare the usernames.

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gokhan
You assume usernames are kept along with tweets.

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p4bl0
The username is on the page so it is retrieved one way or an other.

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aoprisan
how is this possibly a bug? this is done for SEO reasons, many sites do this..
also, this has nothing to do with hashes, very misleading title/traffic trap.

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tkellogg
You can do this at github too. Really confused me the first time I saw a
commit referenced for a user that didn't have the commit yet...

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raverbashing
IMHO

For SEO and UX the current scheme is good. So they should keep using it.

But the problem is thinking that "we use REST so every darn resource on the
site has to follow this pattern even though it makes no sense to use it"

I don't think twitter is going to filter by user to see if it matches the url.
The key for the tweet is the tweet_id and that's the key to their (hugely
cached) DB

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loceng
I imagine it’s likely used for tracking what links / tweets you were the
originator of sharing?

Perhaps in the future you coud have fun with that by associating certain
content with people’s Twitter account names. Not sure what affect it would
have though. :)

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rmc
For the record, Twitter are getting rid of the hashbang

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p4bl0
The hashbang is an entirely separate issue.

