Twitter Switches From TinyURL To Bit.ly | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Switches From TinyURL To Bit.ly

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19 pointscoglethorpe19 comments

Interesting choice of TLD. I can only assume this means they'll be sure to conform to all relevant Libyan law, since it only takes one court order to pull their domain registration. (Cf. http://nic.ly/regulations.php)

Every time I hear something about URL shortners, a part of me dies inside.

My Thoughts: Twitter is the main reason for the increase in URL Shortners. Instead of depending on outside services, Twitter should (must) implement their own shortning service. Something like !02u389 or ^02u389 that maps to a real URL. (like their #hastags and @replies)

Agreed. And if they did roll their own, they could do nice things like hover over a short url and it'll show you the destination url. That sort of thing is easier when you're running both parts of the system.

The thing is, none of this is necessary. HTML has a built in URL shortener:

  <a href="http://example.com/long">Short</a>

There you go.

Twitter is already parsing URLs out of tweets in order to feed them through bit.ly. At that point, the length of the URL isn't relevant -- it's been turned into a single token and pulled from the tweet.

Why don't we just stop there instead of first stopping off at the shortener before writing our HTML?

That doesn't work as a text message.

Do people actually use SMS with Twitter any more?

If you are in a situation where you can only receive messages via text, then you aren't able to visit web pages.

So they could replace the urls with "[url]" or somesuch when sending them via SMS.

Mobile phones can do both. Not all phones are connected to the internet all the time, so it would make sense to receive twitter messages using SMS, and then connect to the net.

Well, for most everybody it does, actually (sending back-to-back SMSes). Maybe some providers/phones don't implement these things properly, but these are specific situations which should be handled in a different way.

I like Twitter's character limit for shaping the communication, but URLs shouldn't be included in the character count. Ideally, the receiver should send their short message with an HTML link, and Twitter should figure out what to do with that based on the receiver's capabilities and preferences.

That may include sending the full HTML, a bit.ly version, dropping it altogether, or breaking it up into multiple SMSes. If you're using SMS with Twitter, then they have your cell phone number and (thus) know your provider, so this isn't a monumental task.

This all makes me wonder: if you have an SMS enabled phone which is capable of following URLs in a browser, can't Twitter just SMS you a link to the full tweet (HTML links and all)? If not, just fucking drop the URLs since they're useless anyway.

What's particularly silly about all this is that when using the website to tweet you by definition do not need a URL shortener. You are not allowed to type more than 140 characters in the input field, so your message is necessarily already under 140 chars, so the shortening does nothing. I find this particularly frustrating since I have a message with a perfectly legible URL, hit send, and all of a sudden its a short URL that now one know where it goes anymore. If it auto shortened your URL as you pasted it in (as opposed to after hitting reply/send), then it would at least allow to type more, but as it is, the auto shortening serves no user-purpose.

bit.ly has one drawback: a proliferation of bit.ly URLs pointing to the same URL, because every user can get an individual abbreviation.

That makes reverse lookups infeasible (get tinyurl for url, search twitter for tinyurl - see who links to you). At least with tinyurl most abbreviations were the same.

Why don't they just make their own? Seems like keeping that data 'in house' would be wise.

"Bit.LY is a portfolio company of Betaworks, which is also an investor in Twitter"

From the perspective of the investors, they are keeping it "in house" By pairing work of two investments, they make both a little stronger (well, bitly a lot stronger).

Hoping some of the hype of twitter might rub off on bit.ly I'd say if I was skeptical. Still amazing bit.ly got funded.

Isn't this a libian domain name? Can that country/somebody there take it back if they want to?

Why does Twitter need URL shorteners at all?

Well, there's an argument to be made for them, when including the full URL in a message would cause it to exceed the SMS character limit.

However, there's no reason to use one (and lots of reasons not to) when the URL doesn't break the 140-character limit, or when the message isn't going out via the SMS gateway.

I'm not holding my breath for Twitter to implement such logic, though; they seem to have a truly unhealthy fascination with URL shorteners.

> Breaking news from the red-hot world of URL shorteners.

I don't know if the goal of the author was that but after the first sentence of the article I was laughing like a mad :)

I just use http://is.gd/ when twittering. Shorter by one character. ;-)

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