Url Shorteners: Destroying the Web Since 2002

2 Million Cligs Short URLS Cracked

http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2009/06/2-million-cligs-short-urls-hac.html

Iā€™m not sure thereā€™s a universal answer, beyond something like rev=canonical where the control is in the publishers hands, not the users, so it has itā€™s own problems. However, there is a fairly simple solution for Twitter.

First, Twitter should provide itā€™s 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 ā€œtheā€ 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 ā€œsneak byā€ this conversion, but if the shortener isnā€™t known, itā€™s not likely that someoneā€™s going to click through using that URL when all other shorteners have been scrubbed. For known shorteners that donā€™t 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 thatā€™s 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 wonā€™t 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 donā€™t 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 thatā€™s 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. :slight_smile:

@Mike,

I think you just told us.

I wish you hadnā€™t. Itā€™s kind of a scary picture.

:wink:

By the way. Twitter doesnā€™t care what you think.

Neither does Google.

Thatā€™s one of the benefits of being big. Enough people use you that you no longer have to please the loud users, just the majority.

So is it bad when I do this? https://twitter.com/SonoranCellist/status/2163487721

Last night i was a victim of shortened URL. Tinyurl must set preview link feature as a default one.

Couldnā€™t agree with Dave A more.

@wds

Appreciate fully that I can just unfollow Jeff. Thing is sometimes (often) he tweets interesting stuff about HIS life, HIS site, HIS opinions that Iā€™d prefer not to miss. So Iā€™ll politely(-ish, but please note the smiley) point out that the ā€œlink noiseā€ makes his Twitter feed less valuable to me. Will he care? Should he care? I doubt it very much.

Not sure where the ā€œtrending topicsā€ thing comes from, but personally I think it only tells you that ā€œsocietyā€ moves quickly from being interested in one thing to being interested in something else.

try this one, and see where it leads to :smiley:
http://tinyurl.com/suckverymuch

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 donā€™t know what you are clicking on. Itā€™s even worse when Twitter auto-shortens linksā€¦ they are in bed with these shortners if you havenā€™t realized.

This seems to have been noted here already but Twitter = Annoying. Iā€™m sure that I donā€™t care what anyone person is doing at any moment (no offense Jeff), and Iā€™m 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 didnā€™t get a freaking BB to have a QWERTY keyboard for nothing dangit!!! But seriouslyā€¦ if Iā€™m watching the news why the hell would I go jump on my pc to look at that news channels ā€œtweetsā€. And if Iā€™m at dinner, Iā€™m enjoying dinner with the family, maybe some friends and having a drink and I donā€™t give a crap to check out twitter to see what the progress of Hanselmanā€™s homemade arcade is at any given time. Geez people step away from your pcā€™s for like 2 seconds to enjoy other things in life.

Iā€™m the same. I donā€™t see the hype thatā€™s involved around Twitter. I mostly think that people join it because itā€™s 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 Iā€™ve 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
Iā€™m not complaining about how Jeff uses Twitter. I donā€™t follow him, and based on this post Iā€™m unlikely to start.

Iā€™m just suggesting that if he was using the right tool for the right job, he wouldnā€™t have written this post complaining that the tools arenā€™t working for him.

Twitter is a fad and will eventually fizzel out. I also donā€™t get why people are so hung up about Twitter. In fact I stopped using it because I think itā€™s 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, itā€™s text posting. Again, thatā€™s its limits. I donā€™t see what the uproar is about. Itā€™s 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 thatā€™s the case.

I use to hate Facebook (vowed never to use it because I thought it was just stupid) but now Iā€™m 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 ā€œkeywords 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.

Nice article. [More details here] http://tinyurl.com/kvu6ed

URL shorteners are an unnecessary quirk of Twitterā€™s interface that are not good for the web.