URL Shortener Analysis - Tweets from 2009 vs. 2012 | Hacker News Reader

URL Shortener Analysis - Tweets from 2009 vs. 2012

ewencp.org

13 pointsjterrace10 comments

I'm not sure what the point of this analysis is. That Twitter is wrapping each and every URL, however short, is a known fact. And since people are using different URL shorteners, URLs are bound to be re-wrapped when a tweet is retweeted.

Right, it isn't that surprising. I was originally motivated by the general question of how many URL shorteners you have to hop through to get to sites from Twitter. What this doesn't show is as interesting as what it does: other URL shorteners seem to be behaving well since they haven't increased the rate of re-wrapping already short URLs, including services like Facebook where you might expect they would do so for the same reasons Twitter does.

But to really answer your question, I didn't intend to make a particular point -- I collected the data to answer a question and then dug in a bit more to see if I could find anything else interesting.

It's a known fact, but nevertheless annoying that Twitter URL LENGTHENS, and annoying that Twitter thinks it's ok to rebrand publisher shorteners like nyti.ms or tcrn.ch which help users recognize where the redirect will take them.

Twitter even shortens things that you didn't intend users to be clicking through; it you want to tell people to connect to your IRC server or want to talk about a host name redirection issue, you're screwed.

But these publisher specific shorteners no longer serve any function surely. They were because you had to use a shortener, so they created their own. Now everything goes through t.co you effectively do not need a shortener yourself. For your own site you get no more analytic data from a shortener than a real url.

I don't generally use sharing services; I email links while reading the page. I like emailing a link that I know doesn't line break. That just needs to be less than 70 chars, but many news sites are longer. So as long as they're shortening, might as well shorten for all venues. Twitter's shortener is useless in this direct sharing case.

Another publisher specific function is, as I mentioned, letting a user know through your branded short URL what this shortened link is likely to take them to.

I thought the point was that Twitter can add a few lines of code that check whether a URL is shortened before re-wrapping. Fewer redirects, less time till I get to the real content.

Twitter want the data so they decided you have to wrap in t.co. They dont care about indirection. Though they could try to undo other shortners.

At least on the Twitter web site, they already have the unwrapped URLs -- see the data-expanded-url and data-ultimate-url attributes on links (and, of course, at least one unwrapping is used for displaying the link).

They probably don't want to completely undo other shorteners, however, because these services aren't only used for shortening. I absolutely believe it's beneficial for them to have multiple levels of indirection so others can gather stats, I just don't like it as a user who is consuming the links. If the amount of indirection, delay in loading pages, and brittleness of links gets bad enough, maybe it eventually will make sense for them to try harder to avoid it.

But they could, in some cases, avoid increasing the amount of indirection and still gather the same stats. For example, on their site, since they open links in a new tab anyway, they could make that link direct and capture the click event with a separate AJAX request in the original Twitter tab.

If you focus only on page load latency, other sites/services besides URL shorteners are making things worse. I regularly notice some small delay waiting for my click on a Google result to go through Google's servers since they (annoyingly, in my opinion) swap out the target URL for a wrapped version at the last minute. Of course, Google has other good reasons for doing this as well -- stats and removing referral information immediately come to mind.

I also didn't show that this negatively impacts user experience. It could be that t.co, on average, requires so little overhead that the extra level of indirection doesn't matter. But I think it's worth looking into, and if it does have a negative effect, figure out ways to mitigate these effects.

Another issue is that people who use twitter want stats, and t.co has no public stats interface, so people use bitly etc as they still want data.

On mobile I notice the slowness of t.co a lot. On desktop I have been noticing waiting for the google redirects too recently. So I think they are a problem, but potentially more resources thrown at the problem could fix this, but using other means would be better as you suggest.

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