2 Million Cligs Short URLS Cracked
http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2009/06/2-million-cligs-short-urls-hac.html
2 Million Cligs Short URLS Cracked
http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2009/06/2-million-cligs-short-urls-hac.html
Iām not sure thereās a universal answer, beyond something like rev=canonical where the control is in the publishers hands, not the users, so it has itās own problems. However, there is a fairly simple solution for Twitter.
First, Twitter should provide itās own URL shortening service. How about http://tw.it to be cute. This service should provide APIs for reversing the short URL. Nothing new here, most of the shortening services do all of this, but Twitter needs to own ātheā service used by all tweets in order to control user experience.
Next, Twitter should translate all other shortened URLs to use a Twitter shortened URL. Unknown shorteners obviously will āsneak byā this conversion, but if the shortener isnāt known, itās not likely that someoneās going to click through using that URL when all other shorteners have been scrubbed. For known shorteners that donāt provide a mechanism for unshortening, they should be translated to a shortened URL to a page warning of the potential problems related to following through to the link.
Now, we have one official shortener thatās used in basically every tweet. Twitter clients can now take advantage of this. No more choosing what shortener to use when sending, and when receiving the URL should always be unshortened for display. True SMS clients wonāt be able to do any of this, of course, but little utility is lost by this fact.
It makes me happy that I have only a vague and peripheral idea what Twitter is, and donāt care enough to STFW and find out more.
The cli.gs debacle proves one thing: Twitter should have its own URL shortening service.
Ideally, it should even be transparent to the Twitter user.
@Robert Fisher, Rob Gilliam:
If people are using twitter in a way that you do not find useful thatās your problem. You can always simply not follow them on twitter. Or if you think trending topics tell you anything about humanity you should check this months most popular search terms at google and weep.
@Anonymous:
Well said.
By the way. Twitter doesnāt care what you think.
Neither does Google.
Thatās one of the benefits of being big. Enough people use you that you no longer have to please the loud users, just the majority.
Last night i was a victim of shortened URL. Tinyurl must set preview link feature as a default one.
Couldnāt agree with Dave A more.
Appreciate fully that I can just unfollow Jeff. Thing is sometimes (often) he tweets interesting stuff about HIS life, HIS site, HIS opinions that Iād prefer not to miss. So Iāll politely(-ish, but please note the smiley) point out that the ālink noiseā makes his Twitter feed less valuable to me. Will he care? Should he care? I doubt it very much.
Not sure where the ātrending topicsā thing comes from, but personally I think it only tells you that āsocietyā moves quickly from being interested in one thing to being interested in something else.
I agree. Destroying the web may be an overstatement (aka hype to get us on this blog) but shorteners are a big problem. If you are a domain owner you lose the branding of your links. As a user, it should annoy the crap out of you (as it does me) if you donāt know what you are clicking on. Itās even worse when Twitter auto-shortens linksā¦ they are in bed with these shortners if you havenāt realized.
This seems to have been noted here already but Twitter = Annoying. Iām sure that I donāt care what anyone person is doing at any moment (no offense Jeff), and Iām sure that if anyone of any importance in my life wants to contact me they can use the good old fashioned phone, or the technologies that may not be deemed as cool as twitter anymore which include normal IM and text messaging. I didnāt get a freaking BB to have a QWERTY keyboard for nothing dangit!!! But seriouslyā¦ if Iām watching the news why the hell would I go jump on my pc to look at that news channels ātweetsā. And if Iām at dinner, Iām enjoying dinner with the family, maybe some friends and having a drink and I donāt give a crap to check out twitter to see what the progress of Hanselmanās homemade arcade is at any given time. Geez people step away from your pcās for like 2 seconds to enjoy other things in life.
Iām the same. I donāt see the hype thatās involved around Twitter. I mostly think that people join it because itās being heavily advertised but after a week they stop using it and retreat back to Facebook.
Everyone ignores another real useful use of shortened URLs: telling someone a URL over a non-web medium - phone or podcast or written. I know that Hanselman used to have the short URLs on his podcast which worked really well. This use is great, as is the other way Iāve used shortening services recently - to send a URL via post-it note. Hit a URL shortener and suddenly you only have to write down 10-15 characters and it is much easier to fit on the note.
There seems to be one thing which is missing from these URL shorteners that everyone is complaining about, and that is persistence. If the URL shorteners would publish their data to the web through a periodic torrent every once in a while like the StackOverflow data feed, then people could archive the short URL => Long URL mapping and recreate a service if it dies later, lengthening URLs long after the service has turned to dust. You could brute-force the mapping yourself actually if you just know the character set which they use for shortening, but that is not nice. I believe that providing a torrent every say, week or so should balance timeliness. If the torrent was constructed carefully (with similar file structure and updates), you could even just download the new data in each week. Using BitTorrent also lowers the bandwidth needed by the shortener by a large factor.
@wds
Iām not complaining about how Jeff uses Twitter. I donāt follow him, and based on this post Iām unlikely to start.
Iām just suggesting that if he was using the right tool for the right job, he wouldnāt have written this post complaining that the tools arenāt working for him.
Twitter is a fad and will eventually fizzel out. I also donāt get why people are so hung up about Twitter. In fact I stopped using it because I think itās just retarded.
If you really want to see a marketing opportunity for your company at least, Facebook to me is still a key to any business trying to drive more traffic. Now there is a site to STILL be focusing on and trying to utilize more for your target markets.
This Twitter is overrated. And most people just use it to brag. Boooring. Big deal, itās text posting. Again, thatās its limits. I donāt see what the uproar is about. Itās time to move past this Twitter Phenomenon and focus on real sites that give you a lot more interesting options to market to potential new customers.
Are we so sad that all we have to talk about is Twitter? Man, life must be pretty lame for you if thatās the case.
I use to hate Facebook (vowed never to use it because I thought it was just stupid) but now Iām stuck on the damn thing. Am I stuck on Twitterā¦hell no. It gets old quickly. Facebook does not.
I see both sides. On one hand you see these so-called SEO experts touting ākeywords is everythingā which leads to people creating keyword-rich URLs that are in excess of 100 characters long that drive us nuts. They should be punished. The rest of us however, who have reasonably lengthed URLs (20 characters or less), should not have to use a shortformā¦we already are shortform.
URL shorteners are an unnecessary quirk of Twitterās interface that are not good for the web.