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Twitter launches own shortener t.co

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Re: Twitter launches own shortener t.co

#11

Post by muppetman »

arohner wrote: post #5

"We will be updating the TOS to require you to check t.co and register the click." Damn. Looks like URL shorteners are here to stay, permanently, and twitter is crowding out all existing link shorteners.

Exactly.

While they'll "wrap" other shortening services, what's the point now? People won't use them and they'll fall by the wayside. Not really a bad thing in my opinion (people use them now when they don't even need to) but still a bit of a smack in the face to services that essentially helped Twitter in their early days.

Re: Twitter launches own shortener t.co

#12

Post by coderdude »

mattmanser wrote: post #10

What is wrong with these people, just fix twitter so url's don't count to the count. Morons. There's no better user experience to a shortened url, it's like having unprotected sex with a random in a nightclub, you've no idea what you could end up with. Repeat after me, shortened urls break the web and are inherently evil.

It's been said one hundred million times, but the reason is for SMS.

Re: Twitter launches own shortener t.co

#13

Post by solutionyogi »

mattmanser wrote: post #10

What is wrong with these people, just fix twitter so url's don't count to the count. Morons. There's no better user experience to a shortened url, it's like having unprotected sex with a random in a nightclub, you've no idea what you could end up with. Repeat after me, shortened urls break the web and are inherently evil.

http://That.will.probably.lead.to.abuse.as.I.can.send.a.long...

Re: Twitter launches own shortener t.co

#14

Post by mattmanser »

solutionyogi wrote: post #13
mattmanser wrote: post #10

What is wrong with these people, just fix twitter so url's don't count to the count. Morons. There's no better user experience to a shortened url, it's like having unprotected sex with a random in a nightclub, you've no idea what you could end up with. Repeat after me, shortened urls break the web and are inherently evil.

http://That.will.probably.lead.to.abuse.as.I.can.send.a.long...

Are you a programmer or a wuss? Think this isn't easily fixable?

Re: Twitter launches own shortener t.co

#15

Post by mattmanser »

coderdude wrote: post #12
mattmanser wrote: post #10

What is wrong with these people, just fix twitter so url's don't count to the count. Morons. There's no better user experience to a shortened url, it's like having unprotected sex with a random in a nightclub, you've no idea what you could end up with. Repeat after me, shortened urls break the web and are inherently evil.

It's been said one hundred million times, but the reason is for SMS.

That's not a defence, it's an excuse.

Re: Twitter launches own shortener t.co

#17

Post by natrius »

apike wrote: post #8

From users' perspective, the big thing here is that clients can now show where links in tweets actually lead. For brevity, the link text should probably just be the domain it leads to, but it should make things a whole lot more readable. Before - This is a great news site: http://bit.ly/2Mp91y After - This is a great news site: news.ycombinator.com A loss for URL shortener services, but a win for users.

Clients could have easily done this before.

  HEAD /2Mp91y HTTP/1.1
  Host: bit.ly

  ...

  Status: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved
  Location: http://news.ycombinator.com/
If the goal was minimizing requests, Twitter could've saved the endpoint on its end and passed the data through the API. A new shortener was unnecessary, though it's easy to see why it is desirable for them.

Re: Twitter launches own shortener t.co

#18

Post by tcdent »

dmix wrote: post #7
arohner wrote: post #5

"We will be updating the TOS to require you to check t.co and register the click." Damn. Looks like URL shorteners are here to stay, permanently, and twitter is crowding out all existing link shorteners.

They already know what everyones clicking on. Except maybe in the twitter clients.

"Twitter clients" is a larger term than you realize. I've done banner campaigns, widgets and promotional websites that all display tweets in ways Twitter would be unable to track without this.

Re: Twitter launches own shortener t.co

#19

Post by [deleted] »

mattmanser wrote: post #10

What is wrong with these people, just fix twitter so url's don't count to the count. Morons. There's no better user experience to a shortened url, it's like having unprotected sex with a random in a nightclub, you've no idea what you could end up with. Repeat after me, shortened urls break the web and are inherently evil.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter launches own shortener t.co

#20

Post by fizx »

paulgb wrote: post #9

> If you are already partial to a particular shortener when you tweet, you can continue to use it for link shortening and analytics as you normally would, and we'll wrap the shortened links you submit. I really hope this habit doesn't catch on. If it does each link will have three points of failure instead of one (as it should) or two (as it will with t.co).

Twitter will likely crawl the final targets of the urls, so that when bit.ly goes out of business, the t.co urls pointing to bit.ly can get redirected to the canonical link. So I don't think it's quite as bad as you're thinking.
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