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Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

cranialsoup.blogspot.com

21–30 of 118 posts

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#21

How about putting some of the blame on Tweetdeck? Shouldn't "short enough" links be allowed to stay intact?

Yes, they should. But what's worse? Software that people don't even pay for being stupid in a fairly minor way, or bit.ly being anticompetitive and severely hurting its users in the process? He was focusing on the major issue.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

They could apply URL shortening to a tweet when delivering over SMS, if necessary.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#23
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.

Actually I remember a huge discussion a few days ago about how Twitter has a very large base of urban African-American users who do, in fact, use SMS to access it.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

They could apply URL shortening to a tweet when delivering over SMS, if necessary.

[deleted]

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#25

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.)

She only started to get uppity after the extremely terse and unforgiving reply from bit.ly ("We don't allow that"), obviously we should all wait a while before writing emails or blog posts while angry, but we're also all human.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#26
post #10
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.

It's a standard http 301 redirect, not a "funky redirection layer".

    /Users/sjs % curl -i http://xrl.in/33qj
    HTTP/1.1 301 Permanent Redirect
    Date: Sun, 09 May 2010 00:38:19 GMT
    Server: Apache
    Location: http://www.donationcoder.com/CodingSnacks/index.php
    Content-Length: 0
    Content-Type: text/html

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#27
post #8

She forgot #3: Just use one of the whitelisted shorteners she mentioned further up in the article, e.g. goo.gl.

Not quite as simple as that, none of the three are readily available to use by just, say, visiting the site and typing in an URL. You need toolbars/extensions/clients etc. If she usually uses a client that's set to xrl.in changing to another shortening service might be a massive pain.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#28
post #12
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…

yeah, I'm very surprised there isn't a twt.tr or something. Maybe they're holding out for .co...

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#29

How about putting some of the blame on Tweetdeck? Shouldn't "short enough" links be allowed to stay intact?

Yes, they should. But what's worse? Software that people don't even pay for being stupid in a fairly minor way, or bit.ly being anticompetitive and severely hurting its users in the process? He was focusing on the major issue.

I agree that bit.ly aren't being cool about this, clearly they should fix it.

On the other hand, you could say that Tweetdeck is actually being stupid in a pretty major way. I have a hard time imagining this scenario occuring without the help of Tweetdeck, or other lazily written convenience shortener functions.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#30
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.

Tons and tons of people still use twitter via SMS. @EV talked about this during his (otherwise boring) SXSW talk. I don't see them ditching that anytime soon.
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