Confirmed: Digg Just Hijacked Your Twitter Links
mashable.com
mashable.com
Luckily this is easy to fix going forward: before sharing a link make sure it isn't using Digg's domain. If it is, resolve it and send the original. Rinse, repeat.
Well, but the Digg short links are just redirecting to other Digg pages. So it's not straightforward to resolve it.
Sometimes in a startup, people can get crazy. I love having a level head on the team. I mean, it takes passion and exhuberance and a little bit of crazy to make it all work, but you don't want to go over the edge.
It's all kind of coming into a fever pitch. It seems like the internet is losing the people who understand what makes sense. I think it's gotten to the point that the ad based models and the social networking and the big investments with no revenue are going to start scrambling to stay alive and we are going to see a lot more decisions that, from the outside, seem ridiculous.
From the inside though, there are few options and these companies are going to have to go with something.
The eternal september is a constant search for a new january.
From "Why Japan’s Cellphones Haven’t Gone Global" to "Hardware bulk prevents Japanese cellphone globalization". Throw on a subtitle! Don't worry, I know where to find the actual article title. Sure, don't change titles to something weird and unrecognizable, but half the time I have no idea what I'm in for. Spoil it for me, summarize the whole damn thing in the title if you can.
C'est la vie.
http://twitter.com/kevinrose/status/2729862918
just now reading the digg short url discussion, I was not aware this changed and will check in on it tomorrow (was on vacation for 2 weeks)
Leo Laporte had Digg co-founder Kevin Rose on his show and asked him about this. You can see it on Twit Live – the Diggbar discussion starts at the 11:26 mark. Here is an excerpt:
* (Laporte gives Rose the background from an article on Techcrunch)
* Laporte: Is that true?
* Rose: That’s a good question.
* Laporte: You don’t know?
* Rose: I’ve been gone for 2 weeks so I don’t know what got pushed, what code got pushed and how it functions but my last understanding is that what we wanted to do is have it so that if you click on a Digg URL it takes you to the Digg stories so you can Digg it. Rather than providing a short URL service that just forwards and does redirection we would just do a URL service just for Digg articles. Just like the same way that Techcrunch does “techcrunch slash 85374″ – if you go to that you’re not going to go to some other site you’re going to go to techcrunch. That’s the story.
* Laporte: So you’re backing off on the original idea which is a general URL shortening service…
* Rose: Correct.
2) Wait for new links to be created
3) Without telling anyone stop being a URL shortening service and keep all the links to yourself
4) Deny you knew it went on but then admit you knew exactly what went on
...
5) Profit?
That aside, you're right that an extra layer in there just adds more room for things to go wrong.
They've got the capital, twitter either needs to buy a url shortener, or at least play kingmaker and push one service.
They could even sell the click-through analytics to their large customers.
URL shorteners are a hack, there's no reason to encourage them any further.
All snark aside, putting together something as rich as bit.ly is NOT an incredibly simple thing to create. And twitter will need to incorporate such functionality in there, or people WILL find ways to use their favourites to get the functionality they're used to.
The way they have done the default has always bugged me--they don't shorten URLs as you type them so if you're over 140 characters it won't shorten, but if your message is under 140 characters it sometimes (only sometimes) shortens the URL. Which is unnecessary and annoying, if the space is there why not show the full URL?
Making a functional link redirector? Yes, absolutely. There are frameworks that you could toss something together with in an hour that would scale enough for most people's purposes. With some frameworks you can get pretty close to true internet-scale scalability in a weekend. (I'd think Yaws and Erlang here.) I've seen framework tutorials use this as the demo, and, again, we're talking things that can get awfully close to internet scale without much work.
Making all the stuff that apparently surround link redirectors in some desperate attempt to make it "monetizable"? It would take longer, but unlike the case for "replicating Stack Overflow" where all the extra stuff is the real value and will take more than a weekend, that's all extra stuff that nobody really cares about very much in this case. A page that takes a URL, returns a URL, and does nothing else really is enough for the vast majority of uses.
It's a different class of problem. This truly is a fundamentally trivial problem. I personally see no reasonable way to "monetize" this trivial service, because the market value of a URL synonym is going to trend very strongly towards zero due to effectively infinite supply.
(Much as your point was that it's hard to recreate bit.ly rather than the weekend snark, note my point is more that doing that is a waste of time, mostly-crap features done to benefit the redirector, not the user, and that this truly is easy to recreate enough to drive supply sky-high.)
Anyway, there is an easy solution to this problem. It's called using any one of the other 100 million URL shorteners.
<Dan Rather>
When I throw a tennis ball at a wall I expect it to bounce back.
I would be frightened if the ball sticks to the wall.
It's called using the real URL.
Tweet: petition @digg to stop hijacking twitter links. no bait and switch! http://act.ly/9u Retweet to sign #digg