I don’t use Twitter – not against it, just apathetic to it.
That said, I think the primary reason that it has taken off in usage is because it is taking advantage of the fact that the largest percentage of “computer” users in the world are in fact, cell phone users where the cell phone is their primary computer and communication tool.
Ross Shannon has got the right idea.
Somehow I doubt that the downfall of the Internet will be TinyURL and Twitter.
URL shortners are not meant for linking in blogs and web pages. They’re meant to be temporary links from email, IM and things like Twitter.
I’m not sure how jump from “temporary URL” to “Walled Garden” but it is defiantly a stretch.
-CF
search for “Don’t get me wrong” site:codinghorror.com yields 147 hits. Time to retire that phrase!
its worrying but seen as twitter will be dead by this time next year and twitter is the only reason short urls are remotely popular then who cares
I do agree. However, what about the websites that create the horrifically long, non human readable URLs in the first place. They could be destroying the web just as much.
Every website on the internet should offer a shortening service for every URL on the site. For instance, this post could be: codinghorror.com/001276.
Safe.mn (http://safe.mn/) makes a daily dump off all sort links available to anybody: ftp://safe.mn/ Data are under CC license, anybody can mirror the data.
I detest shortened URLs because I want to know where I am going.
Security issues are one reason, but there are others –
If I’m at work, I don’t want to go to youtube or any video site.
I don’t want to follow a link to something I’ve already read, or a site that is already on my daily reading list.
I don’t want to follow a link to any kind of binary file, even PDFs, without knowing it ahead of time, because I like to know what my system is going to do when I click a link.
And there are some sites that I just find annoying, and I don’t want to go to them.
I cannot know any of these things with a short URL.
Confirming that URL shorteners are evil.
The 140 char limit is because of the same limit in SMS (So a Tweet can be sent to/from a mobile phone)
It is this that is the problem…
Try asking a Japanese web user when they last typed in a URL … the answer is likely to be never… they always search for it
Short URL services are loved by journalists, so they can publish URL’s in magazines (pointless anyway) and on twitter… get a blog and use your mobile for making calls and reading blogs …
Yeah, I’m completely sick of Twitter. I’m sick of hearing how Twitter has replaced or will replace all other forms of textual communication including forms, private instant messaging (because, of course, we want everything to be public), and the like. I’m pretty weirded out when I see news anchors on CNN (substitue your preferred network) with a straight face reading inane tweets and actually saying the crazy handles of the twitterers with a straight face.
Also, yeah, I noticed your “patented” formula. I’m actually please to see you talk about Twitter madness like this. It’s the first good post in months. 
However, your Twitter messages are inane. Those 4-word incomprehensible summaries followed always by a YouTube link are very odd. Ironically, I agree, the URL shorteners is why I don’t even bother click on any links in Twitter anymore unless the description is very, very explicit. I know this will invite the inevitable “but you can conigufe the URL shortener to preview the URL,” however, I just can’t be bothered.
I think sites could re-construct a shortening services links using their referer url’s is they have any sort of good analytics
I still think twitter is hype, the very definition of self-regard. Who cares what you think? Plus it’s blocked at my office.
and then there’s http://www.longurlplease.com/ and http://www.hugeurl.com/ of course.
Those are feekin’ awesome.
I like that Atlassian Confluence generates short urls. Since the application itself generates the urls they are never wrong. Even if you relocate a page within the wiki, the short url will still point at the correct page.
“as a software developer, you’ll be fortunate to build one project that achieves critical […] I don’t think I will.”
Yeah, real shame that stackoverflow never caught on.