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Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

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Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#101

Post by nollidge »

carussell wrote: post #99
nollidge wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The brevity is what makes Twitter distinct from everything else.

Funny, I thought the reason people should use a service is its worth, not auxiliary novelties. If I make a pitch to somebody, do you think I should rest assured that they'll go for it if I word it in the following way, "Now I know that by almost all metrics this kind of behavior is bad, but we did some looking into what other people are doing, and it's unique ."?

You seem quite confident that the 140-character limit is an auxiliary novelty, whereas I think it's rather central to Twitter's success. There are any number of other similar services (LiveJournal, Wordpress, Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr) that do not enforce any such limit, yet everybody's all over Twitter.

And which metrics show that limiting updates to 140 characters is bad behavior? URL shortening sucks, for sure, but that doesn't mean the limit on prose isn't useful or attractive to users.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#102

Post by carussell »

vsync wrote: post #95
bcl wrote: post #61

Gee, how about we stop acting like we need to limit things to 140 characters? This isn't SMS you know. We do have the bandwidth to actually exchange useful information and real URLs. Twitter, bit.ly, et. al. are all pretty damn silly. Even back in the days of 300bd modems and BBS's we weren't this dumb.

Twitter is still fully usable via SMS and that's both useful and unique.

Are there any handsets in use out there that support SMS and don't support Concatenated SMS? This is a serious question.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#103

Post by afterburner »

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.

Or have the link phrase count towards the limit, but not the actual link itself.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#104

Post by carussell »

romland wrote: post #84
alextgordon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is the immediate thought one gets, I can guarantee you that Twitter considered this. It surprises me that parent was deemed insightful. Should what parent suggests be announced I expect it would be in place for about six minutes (+/- 5) before we'd see the first Tweet with the actual message in the form of a URL. http://example.com/Hi_this_is_a_tweet ... And as someone else stated, long messages are clearly agai…

It surprises me that parent was deemed insightful.

This isn't Slashdot. There is no "Insightful". Only upvotes.

http://example.com/Hi_this_is_a_tweet*

Eveyone's not going to do that on a regular basis, and Twitter can cap messages at ~1000 characters to prevent egregious abuse and maintain accessibility to SMS users.

It wouldn't be long before someone implemented a packer/cruncher on these messages to be able to squeeze them into a 140 character limit so that it can fit into an SMS.*

Nobody gives a shit about SMS outside of SMS. What might result is that type of service as part of the SMS gateway, which is exactly what Twitter should have done to begin with.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#105

Post by Hexstream »

romland wrote: post #85
edanm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Twitter should just not count URL's towards the 140 characters. All URL's should count as one character.

How long before all tweets are in fact bogus links, you think?

If someone spews lots of bogus links in your tweets wouldn't you unfollow them? If every twitter user starts spewing lots of bogus links wouldn't you stop using twitter?

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#106

Post by MWinther »

bobbyi wrote: post #62
MWinther wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In Tweetdeck, when you paste in the URL, you can see it turn into a bitly URL. It's not as if you don't know that's what's going to be posted. There is a checkbox next to where you compose your tweet for "Auto Shorten URLs" that you can uncheck to disable this behavior. It's right there in plain sight, not buried inside preference dialogs.

Even so, blaming Joe Average for not having the correct settings in Tweetdeck when he's retweeting is hardly a viable way to fix it. New users expect software to do the right thing, which it obviously isn't in this case.

Besides, the functionality is useful for normal length links, I'm just saying Tweetdeck should realize that when saving one or two characters, or even making a link longer by "shortening" it, or if said url is already shortened, the program isn't being very smart when not skipping the shortening in that case.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#107

Post by trezor »

toni wrote: post #76
tdavis wrote: post #36

Firstly, the hypocrisy of a URL shortener blocking another URL shortener's links because they can't be verified is hilarious. Secondly, if a person goes as far as to shorten every link they copy from their browser and use a Twitter client that shortens all links regardless of length, I hardly think they have much room to complain about the system they're fully backing. What did she expect to happen? That Bitly would…

In this case, even running your own URL shortener will not help in any way. Bit.ly blocks any already-shortened URL. Whether it's xrl.in, tinyurl or your own. You can only control your own shortened URL but you have no control when people re-tweet it and pass it through Bit.ly. Which then flags it as harmful.

You can only control your own shortened URL but you have no control when people re-tweet it and pass it through Bit.ly. Which then flags it as harmful.

So bitly, a URL-shortening service, is blocking other shortened URLs because they deem shortened URLs harmful? And here I thought the stupidity of twitter and it's ecosystem of useless URL-shorteners had an actual limit.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#108

Post by dasil003 »

Confusion wrote: post #82
tdavis wrote: post #36

Firstly, the hypocrisy of a URL shortener blocking another URL shortener's links because they can't be verified is hilarious. Secondly, if a person goes as far as to shorten every link they copy from their browser and use a Twitter client that shortens all links regardless of length, I hardly think they have much room to complain about the system they're fully backing. What did she expect to happen? That Bitly would…

The blogger reports that bit.ly updated their page, to explain why a link may be disallowed. He doesn't accept their explanation, but it does make a lot of sense: - Some URL-shorteners re-use their links, so bit.ly can't guarantee the validity of this link. - Some URL-shorteners allow their links to be edited, so bit.ly can't tell where this link will lead you. - Spam and malware is very often propagated by exploitin…

It makes some shallow sense, but on deeper investigation it's anti-competitive bullshit that is not much better than the scams they claim to be protecting you against.

Think about it, since when is bit.ly the arbiter of link safety? Does bit.ly provide you a guarantee that they will not ever link to malware? Of course not! They could not afford the liability on that. Anyone could post a malicious link anywhere. Any page can set up a 301 redirect any time. People can post malware links anywhere any time.

What's going on here is that bit.ly is breaking links arbitrarily, and doing it to third parties without their consent or even knowledge. It might be possible that a credible legal case could be mounted against bit.ly on this basis. Quite simply, it is neither their right nor their responsibility to be the link police of the internet, and it also is far from within their power. These guys are overstepping in a major way.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#109

Post by dasil003 »

toddml wrote: post #44

Todd from bit.ly here. From day one, we've prized security, transparency, reliability, and openness at bit.ly. Along the way, we've made a number of product decisions based on those tenets. Among those are link permanence (link destinations don't change once created), the avoidance of anything that interferes with user experience (we've never framed, nor will we), and a dedicated focus on spam and malware detection,…

That's well-written PR Todd, but the bottom line is this: your false positives are doing potentially severe damage to third parties. These are people who aren't even using your service.

When these things happen you need a way to fix them quickly, or you will find yourselves in legal hot water sooner or later.

Also, I might suggest to you that you have neither the power nor the authority to be the link police on the internet. What you're doing is engaging in an arms race that A) is impossible to win, and B) has numerous innocent bystanders.

I've never really been one to decry the dangers of link shorteners, but this is a great example of how a link shortener—even with a team of stand-up ethical guys behind it—can be bad for the internet.

We've been thinking about signing up for bit.ly pro, and I have to say this throws a wet blanket over the whole thing.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#110

Post by DenisM »

dasil003 wrote: post #109
toddml wrote: post #44

Todd from bit.ly here. From day one, we've prized security, transparency, reliability, and openness at bit.ly. Along the way, we've made a number of product decisions based on those tenets. Among those are link permanence (link destinations don't change once created), the avoidance of anything that interferes with user experience (we've never framed, nor will we), and a dedicated focus on spam and malware detection,…

That's well-written PR Todd, but the bottom line is this: your false positives are doing potentially severe damage to third parties. These are people who aren't even using your service. When these things happen you need a way to fix them quickly, or you will find yourselves in legal hot water sooner or later. Also, I might suggest to you that you have neither the power nor the authority to be the link police on the i…

We've been thinking about signing up for bit.ly pro, and I have to say this throws a wet blanket over the whole thing.

whitelabel shouldn't be nearly as bad - as long as you control the domain name you can always take your ball and go home.

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