Twitter launches own shortener t.co

Post by JoachimSchipper » Wed, Jun 09, 2010, 7:18 AM UTC

hboon wrote: post #77

mitchellhislop wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, reading through the dev documentation for this, "No user will ever see a t.co URL". All they are doing is wrapping the URL, not actually changing anything. All services that have their own URL's will be 100% fine.

That's not true. Their API will now return the t.co URLs in the text section, so if developers don't do anything extra, things will (should, rather, I'm clarifying with them) still work, but t.co URLs will be displayed to users. Their API will return the original links too with markers, so client code can be updated to display the original URLs. Twitter wants developers to display the original URLs and link to the t.…

Post by jamesbritt » Wed, Jun 09, 2010, 8:08 AM UTC

jules wrote: post #89

jamesbritt wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, OK. But being able to pop in a nice terse URL where a long one would break in some E-mail client is handy.

Join us in the 21st century and use HTML emails. You can use any text on a link, amazing huh?

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 09, 2010, 8:48 AM UTC

coderdude wrote: post #23

mattmanser wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's not a defense. It's a fact. My co-worker prefers to receive all tweets via SMS. They advertise the SMS feature at the top of every page. Calling people names at every turn isn't going to make your point more valid.

Post by ericd » Wed, Jun 09, 2010, 9:44 AM UTC

SkyMarshal wrote: post #81

ericd wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is ridiculous... why is this TLD being allowed? Its main use is going to be abuse, ranging from squatting to phishing (chase.co, paypal.co, anyone?).

It looks like they're giving trademarks registered before 2008 first dibs, so as long as those big companies' IT departments are on the ball, they can pre-empt the squatters.

Post by sharkbrainguy » Wed, Jun 09, 2010, 10:42 AM UTC

natrius wrote: post #17

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.