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Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

cranialsoup.blogspot.com

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Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#11

Post by csallen »

tkaemming wrote: post #6

While the author has a right to be upset, her attitude toward the support staff — who likely have no control over the situation — is disgusting. ("Your apology is worthless", "Your refusal to check the link", etc. from the email conversation, and the ensuing comments on the blog post.)

I see your point. I don't think she's railing against the support staffers personally, but against the company itself. "Your apology is worthless", as in "Bit.ly, your apology is worthless". Still, she could've been a bit more tactful.

Anyway, this is quite an eye-opening article. What bit.ly is doing is a great example of how not to run a business. We should be educating people about the internet, not taking advantage of their ignorance so we can lie about our competitors.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#12

Post by ja2ke »

jrockway wrote: post #3

What Twitter needs is to remove the 140 character limitation. Nobody uses SMS anymore, especially when the content contains URLs to non-mobile-friendly sites.

I think Twitter officially supporting and converting URLs into a token at the time a tweet was written would do the trick fine. The 140 limit is what made them, but URLs are obviously a point of failure and frustration, hence the near constant hulabaloo over shorteners and redirects etc. It'd surprising to me that Twitter hasn't offered an official solution for URLs yet, to be honest. They saw people were using @ to reply, and supported it. They saw hash tags and retweets show up and supported them, too. But most users go to a third party to handle links.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#13

Post by alextgordon »

markbao wrote: post #4
jrockway wrote: post #3

What Twitter needs is to remove the 140 character limitation. Nobody uses SMS anymore, especially when the content contains URLs to non-mobile-friendly sites.

I think that would completely go against the concept of Twitter: short-form communication.

They could detect URLs and not count them towards the total message length.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#16

Post by tkaemming »

alextgordon wrote: post #13
markbao wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that would completely go against the concept of Twitter: short-form communication.

They could detect URLs and not count them towards the total message length.

What would happen when those messages are delivered to a user's phone via SMS? There's still a nontrival amount of users having status updates/direct messages delivered to their mobile phones that probably wouldn't appreciate a message with a 50+ character URL (or the URL being stripped, effecting message integrity).

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#17

Post by jbellis »

markbao wrote: post #4
jrockway wrote: post #3

What Twitter needs is to remove the 140 character limitation. Nobody uses SMS anymore, especially when the content contains URLs to non-mobile-friendly sites.

I think that would completely go against the concept of Twitter: short-form communication.

Allowing your users to determine how short is short enough would be a good thing.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#18

Post by Osmose »

I'm having a really hard time believing the scenario where a user follows a shortened link in a re-tweet, sees the bit.ly warming page, assumes that the original author is trying to spread malicious stuff (and that the re-tweeter, whom this user is following and supposedly trusts, is supporting this malicious stuff), and starts telling other people about how untrustworthy the original poster is.

In reality, they'd probably close the page, maybe make a reply tweet confused about the warning, and go on with their life.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#19

Post by patio11 »

markbao wrote: post #4
jrockway wrote: post #3

What Twitter needs is to remove the 140 character limitation. Nobody uses SMS anymore, especially when the content contains URLs to non-mobile-friendly sites.

I think that would completely go against the concept of Twitter: short-form communication.

Is "the concept of Twitter" what people are getting value from? If not, forget "the concept". (In my circles, people seem to be getting value from "an opt-in audience of likeminded people who you may extract business value from someday which does not include your girlfriend, high school buddy, mother, or Farmville." People definitely are not using Twitter primarily for short-form communication: if they were, two tweets out of every three wouldn't include a link to long-form communication.)

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#20

Post by tkaemming »

whughes wrote: post #10
ericz wrote: post #5

That seems rather stupid. How is url-shortening a already url-shortened url a security threat?

Extra cloaking for malicious links? Bit.ly can't exactly check the original site to see if it's OK if it's hidden behind a funky redirection layer. I think that bit.ly was reasonable to have an interstitial, although maybe they should be more open about why and how to remove it.

They could check the endpoint URL by following the HTTP headers on 301/302 redirects.
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