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Comment by jarin | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't just bug me for URLs that are shorter than the t.co URL, but also when I'm posting a link to a website and I want people to see the full URL.

e.g. It is often sufficiently descriptive to tweet "This is a great site: http://actionfiguresridingkittens.tumbly.mil

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"It is often sufficiently descriptive to tweet "This is a great site: http://actionfiguresridingkittens.tumbly.mil

You disappointed me when I clicked that link and found it didn't exist.

Twitter has implemented a decent solution for that, which most clients (including the website) respect - it includes a display_url parameter along with the shortened URL in tweets fetched via the API.

But the displayed URL is truncated with an ellipsis at the end. The OPs URL is likely long enough to trigger that. Sometimes a long URL is all you want to share, but that is now impossible to do. A tweet saying "http://hotchickswithstubbedtoesmakingsexfaces.com/ exists" is a decent tweet, but a tweet saying "http://hotchickswit... exists" isn't as good. And sure, you can mouseover to see the full link, but that's balls.

Agreed. I find short urls to be irritating when I want to share a link. REST makes it so links can be descriptive without visiting the link. I remember sending a link to a friend by DM and having them think it was spam since Twitter shortened it.

There's no preview for this, so you find out too late.

I think a proper short URL looks neater too: "http://t.co/x812ks1 A site about action figures" "http://action.figures.com/rid... A site about action figures"

The short URL may not look pretty, but at least regular Twitter users will quickly learn to process it as "some URL". The longer abbreviated one breaks that convention and by including some actual meaning, it gets in the way.

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