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Twitter launches own shortener t.co

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Re: Twitter launches own shortener t.co

#51

Post by paulgb »

DougBTX wrote: post #32
fizx wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apparently if you have a unique word in the expanded version of your url, then search for your tweet containing only the shortened url using the unique word, you will still find the tweet. I've not tested it myself, but I took it as evidence that they are indeed caching fully resolved urls.

This is true. For example, few of these tweets contain the search term: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=news.ycombinator

Hopefully they'll be resolving all the way down the redirect chain.

Re: Twitter launches own shortener t.co

#53

Post by andrewtj »

coderdude wrote: post #50
andrewtj wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenated_SMS Perhaps this is another anomaly that Americans have to put up with from their carriers — not being one I wouldn't know.

That could very well be. We're underprivileged when it comes to mobiles, unfortunately.

Just out of curiosity, do US carriers allow you to send inter-carrier MMS and can you transfer your phone number between carriers?

Re: Twitter launches own shortener t.co

#54

Post by marbletiles »

"routing links through this service will eventually contribute to the metrics behind our Promoted Tweets platform and provide an important quality signal for our Resonance algorithm"

So this is Twitter's Digg bar: they want to wrap and trace every link that goes in a Tweet? So much for all those custom bit.ly domains. So much for bit.ly.

These guys are going crass quick. @alex's decision to quit is less and less surprising.

Re: Twitter launches own shortener t.co

#55

Post by coderdude »

andrewtj wrote: post #53
coderdude wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That could very well be. We're underprivileged when it comes to mobiles, unfortunately.

Just out of curiosity, do US carriers allow you to send inter-carrier MMS and can you transfer your phone number between carriers?

Yes, they let you send inter-carrier MMS and you can also transfer your number between carriers.

Re: Twitter launches own shortener t.co

#56

Post by alanh »

natrius wrote: post #26
solutionyogi wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If Twitter doesn't check for a valid response at each URL, then this will be possible anyway. If it does check, then this wouldn't be possible anyway.

Not true at all. Sites can be configured to respond to arbitrary subdomains.

Re: Twitter launches own shortener t.co

#57

Post by natrius »

alanh wrote: post #56
natrius wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Twitter doesn't check for a valid response at each URL, then this will be possible anyway. If it does check, then this wouldn't be possible anyway.

Not true at all. Sites can be configured to respond to arbitrary subdomains.

Hm. I thought of that case before I wrote my comment, so I'm not sure how I wrote something that didn't take that into consideration...

Re: Twitter launches own shortener t.co

#58

Post by papachito »

chaosmachine wrote: post #37
SkyMarshal wrote: post #21

Interesting shoutout at the end to COInternet and the now-global .co TLD. I wasn't even aware of that. They're running quite a marketing campaign for the launch, anyone think it will rival .com's popularity?

.co is a huge opportunity for squatters. I can't tell you how many times I've typed "site.co" instead of "site.com" because I hit enter too quickly. For legitimate uses, it's terrible. Imagine having to say "that's co NOT com... see-oh. no M!" every time you give out your domain.

I just type Ctrl+Enter to append the .com, works in chrome, ff and IE at least.

Re: Twitter launches own shortener t.co

#59

Post by tdavis »

marbletiles wrote: post #54

"routing links through this service will eventually contribute to the metrics behind our Promoted Tweets platform and provide an important quality signal for our Resonance algorithm" So this is Twitter's Digg bar: they want to wrap and trace every link that goes in a Tweet? So much for all those custom bit.ly domains. So much for bit.ly. These guys are going crass quick. @alex's decision to quit is less and less surp…

So much for bit.ly.

And this is great news, as far as I'm concerned. Generic shortened URLs are becoming a plague upon the web and are marginally useful at best outside of Twitter. Even more props to Twitter for demystifying links where applicable instead of taking the easier route of pure obscurity. The sooner third-party shorteners disappear from Twitter the sooner they can disappear from the rest of the web and we can have link transparency back again.

On a related note, I'm actually quite happy that Twitter is starting to close up their platform. People can stop pretending it's some open platform for global communication and finally realize it's a novel service thanks to its popularity, but little more.

Re: Twitter launches own shortener t.co

#60

Post by mitchellhislop »

marbletiles wrote: post #54

"routing links through this service will eventually contribute to the metrics behind our Promoted Tweets platform and provide an important quality signal for our Resonance algorithm" So this is Twitter's Digg bar: they want to wrap and trace every link that goes in a Tweet? So much for all those custom bit.ly domains. So much for bit.ly. These guys are going crass quick. @alex's decision to quit is less and less surp…

An update was posted, 3rd party link shorteners are allowed. They will just have to compete.

So, not a Digg-bar. Its what many users want-they put a long ugly link in, and then it gets shorter.

Not the end of bit.ly. Why? Publishers want these numbers, not to give them to twitter.

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