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Ask HN: Why is Facebook resolving a Twitter link as a random person?
3 points by abailin on Dec 3, 2010 | hide | past | favorite
I know this is a question better suited for stackoverflow, but I'm up late on HN and this is really boggling my mind, so please bear with me. I promise it might very well boggle your mind too.

Take a (new) twitter url, ex. http://twitter.com/#!/ycombinator (notice the "#!")

Paste this link on your Facebook wall or the "What's on your mind?" input box on the main Facebook page.

Look at what link this resolves to. For me (and presumably you all) it is "http://twitter.com/#!/d3nidhint"

What gives?

Facebook clearly parses this url and resolves it as something different. If it can do this much, it should properly resolve the url to twitter.com/ycombinator. I searched online and came up with Google links that propose crawling these AJAX urls, but nothing having to do with this weird anomoly.

http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/proposal-for-making-ajax-crawlable.html

Thoughts?




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