Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im | Hacker News Reader

Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

mashable.com

33 pointsonreact-com35 comments

The longevity of short URLs (or any form of redirect) is their primary drawback. Having one company bail out another is not a long-term strategy. The only long-term way to make sure redirects continue to function is to have some kind of open, federated redirect service (which might be what 301works is trying to achieve). However, the kind of flexibility inherent in a federated service implies that the links would not be very short (e.g. 301works.com/bit.ly/abcdef), so they would at best be a backup solution.

The long-term solution for shortlinks is very unclear, as long as services (and who are we kidding: we mean Twitter) require them. Twitter could solve it by allowing metadata around links, but that would break their 140-character protocol, which has been a big factor in their success.

I don't have a solution, or I'd be building a startup around it right now :-)

Twitter could solve it by allowing metadata around links

Twitter could also solve it by upping the 140 character limit to something more reasonable. Any magic reason for the 140 char limit is pretty much gone now.

In the end, I don't know how much any of this matters, Twitter seems overrun by marketeers and self-promoters now, hard to tell if there is enough of a future in it for the URL shorteners to really have much of a future.

> Any magic reason for the 140 char limit is pretty much gone now.

This is incredibly short-sighted. I, for one, still only use Twitter via text. If Twitter allowed for longer messages, I'd be out, as would many of the people that I know.

The plural of anecdote is not data, but just becasue everyone you know uses an app, does not mean that everyone does. I'm sure txt is still _really important_ to Twitter overall.

Sure, but what about a separate field for a URL attached to a message? Do you _have_ to have the URL in the message?

A lot of times, I'll see a bit.ly link and type it in by hand.

Does your phone and provider not support long SMS messages? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenated_SMS ).

I couldn't find a list of providers that support CSMS. That certainly kills any need to limit things to 140.

Sprint doesn't, verizon supports slightly longer then normal text but I don't know if it's CSMS.

All the UK providers seem to, and I haven't seen a phone that doesn't since about 2000.

I have no idea. My phone probably doesn't support them, though. It's pretty terrible. Free is better than paying, unfortunatly.

My nokia 8310 that had in 2001/2 supported it so maybe your phone does

Verizon's phones are notoriously crippled. I'd expect Nokia to have thier act together, though.

That was here in the U.K. I think all networks do and have supported it here for a long time.

from what i remember, twitter used to allow >140 character message updates through their website, and just truncated them to 140 when sending them to sms users.

If txt was _really important_ to Twitter they'd have actually got the length limits right: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=660986

Summary: for languages like Arabic, Hindi, etc., you only get 70 characters total.

Considering they're an American company, I'm not really suprised. Unfortunate, but not suprising.

Twitter could also just have their own URL shortener and require it be used which ensures all links on Twitter last just as long as Twitter does. The web interface could even show expanded URLs (or at least domain) since they'd automatically have that information on hand.

> The longevity of short URLs (or any form of redirect) is their primary drawback. Having one company bail out another is not a long-term strategy. The only long-term way to make sure redirects continue to function is to have some kind of open, federated redirect service (which might be what 301works is trying to achieve). However, the kind of flexibility inherent in a federated service implies that the links would not be very short (e.g. 301works.com/bit.ly/abcdef), so they would at best be a backup solution.

Or someone specifically concerned about longevity: http://purl.org (those aren't short either though).

Bit.ly's not the only one who's made this offer. Whether the tr.im people see it as a helping hand or an opportunity to sell their stuff, though, is up to them.

I have half a feeling that this whole deal was designed to instigate a buyout. It certainly got enough peoples' attention.

Sounds like Bit.ly is offering hosting services. Swoops in to save...that's going a bit far (unless they offer cash).

swoops in to save trim's link structure, is more like it.

but, its a smart move. it helps to validate bitly, both in what its doing and as the leader of its space. makes link redirection seem like it could be more stable.

Why do we need URL shorteners again?

because twitter limits you to 140 characters of input.

The real solution would be for Twitter to not count URLs against the 140 character limit.

But wasn't the requirement that a tweet fit into an SMS? How relevant the SMS medium still is to Twitter is another question...

Analytics on your link sharing.

This would be a truly wise move in the long run. If I read the article right there is no official announcement yet, is it?

It looks like they're in contact but no deal has been reached, and it is implied that there are some sour grapes because of the blog post line quoted, but that's speculation only.

I'm very curious how this will turn out. This was a very short lifecycle for a service, but in the long run this is to be expected for just about every website. Stuff gets created and it dies again.

Url shorteners exist in the first place because of bad design in the websites that need to have their links shortened.

Plenty of websites that I'm familiar with have overlong urls, some to the point of being ridiculous.

Maybe sites should employ their own internal url shortening service, where 'http://somesite.com/shorturl gets mapped to the real url. That way the short urls will live as long as the site.

Long URLs are not a design flaw -- or, at least, not a design flaw in the site itself. Pagerank calculations by Google and the other engines put a lot of weight on words that appear inside the URL, which is why all SEO advice says to put your blog post titles in the URL (Wordpress has this as an opt-in one-click setting). Long URLs are required by Google. If it stopped requiring them, we wouldn't need long URLs anymore, but personally I find them quite useful most of the time, since it's like a very easy preview of what you're about to click on.

That's a good point, but long urls are not exactly 'required' by google.

Giving weight to words in URLs was a mistake in my opinion, it lead to URL spam.

Any kind of ranking system that uses criteria outside of the factor that is best classified as 'human appreciation' will lead to some form of spam.

Oh, and re: the idea of internal URL shorteners, Google's suggestion for rel=canonical

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-y...

is a way to allow those to exist without destroying your pagerank. However, I'm not seeing them too widely implemented yet.

I'd think a 301 Moved Permanently is more appropriate - and also how many URL shorteners work today.

Wise move for whom?

Bit.ly buying tr.im is good for the tr.im guys; I suppose bit.ly would get some good will, so it might make sense from their standpoint, depending upon the price.

Bit.ly hosting existing tr.im links offers nothing to the tr.im folks; I'm not sure why tr.im would go for it, except to prove that they're mensches.

Well, tr.im would possibly get out of some hosting costs since they've promised to keep everything up until December 31st. That said, I'll be surprised if it actually happens.

Wise for bit.ly - It would mean more market share for bit.ly plus it would be a proof of reliance for short URLs. Plus inheriting a good brand has additional value.

They could position tr.im for a different target market than bit.ly bit.ly as the comprehensive one, tr.im as the quick and easy one for instance.

Even in the short it means a wave of good publicity like you see here.

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