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Twitter launches own shortener t.co
- JereCoh 16y agoIt will also be expanding the size of the tweet to 140 not including the URI and providing expanded URIs in addition to the shortened link. More information at http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/14d5474c13ed84aa http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/brow...
- dacort 16y agoIncorrect. The 140 characters includes the length of the t.co link (19 characters), not whatever the original link was.
- scorchin 16y agoFrom their help page: http://help.twitter.com/entries/109623 http://help.twitter.com/entries/109623 > "All links included in Direct Message notification emails currently pass through our link service and are converted to a http://t.co http://t.co link. We've also begun testing this service for links in Tweets" I'm curious whether they're going to outright put a blanket ban on "alternative" URL shorteners like they did with Twitter-based Ad services.
- maukdaddy 16y agoLooks like they're going to wrap existing shortened URLs with t.co: 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. http://blog.twitter.com/2010/06/links-and-twitter-length-shouldnt.html http://blog.twitter.com/2010/06/links-and-twitter-length-sho...
- TotlolRon 16y agoIt is not a shortener. It is a small condom. That's what the .co stands for.
- arohner 16y ago"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.
- dmix 16y agoThey already know what everyones clicking on. Except maybe in the twitter clients.
- tcdent 16y ago"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.
- muppetman 16y agoExactly. 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.
- gojomo 16y ago"We will be updating the TOS to require you to check t.co and register the click." This quote does not appear in the Twitter announcement; is it from elsewhere, or speculation?
- smackfu 16y agoIt's in the google groups link above.
- apike 16y agoFrom 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 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.
- natrius 16y agoClients 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.
- apike 16y agoQuerying each URL would be impractical to do on the Twitter client side, especially on a mobile device, even simply from the latency before you can render perspective. You could render the tweets with the shortened links and then reflow the text if/when each HEAD request returns, but that would probably result in a crummy, slow experience for the reader as they scroll through tweets. Twitter could indeed have done it on their side, but just doing it themselves is more efficient for them and provides a bit of extra user benefit - the fact it's automatic so you get more room for text in your tweets, their malicious link protection, and reliability if you assume Twitter is more reliable than J Random URL Shortener.
- natrius 16y ago> Still, skipping the middle man is both more efficient The middle man will not be skipped. It will be wrapped. Two redirects instead of one. http://twitter.com/twitterapi/status/15741693182 http://twitter.com/twitterapi/status/15741693182
- 16y ago
- paulgb 16y ago> 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).
- fizx 16y agoTwitter 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.
- DougBTX 16y agoApparently 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.
- paulgb 16y agoThis is true. For example, few of these tweets contain the search term: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=news.ycombinator http://search.twitter.com/search?q=news.ycombinator Hopefully they'll be resolving all the way down the redirect chain.
- marcus 16y agoIts url shorteners all the way down...
- mattmanser 16y agoWhat 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.
- coderdude 16y agoIt's been said one hundred million times, but the reason is for SMS.
- mattmanser 16y agoThat's not a defence, it's an excuse.
- coderdude 16y agoIt'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.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- axod 16y agoLast I saw something like 5% of users accessed twitter using SMS. Basing your limits on a very very very niche use case seems bizarre.
- sumeeta 16y agoRealize we are all big time nerds with smartphones. Everyone else doesn't have one (yet?). And when Twitter started out, even fewer of us had them.
- deleted 16y ago
- rbranson 16y agoIt lists another company in the WHOIS for the t.co domain. This begs the question: are they leasing it?
- Frazzydee 16y agoNope. It was registered April 26 2010 by ".CO Founders program". .CO founders are hand-picked to ensure the domain will "contribute to the .CO community in a meaningful way." In return, they get get first dibs on a .CO domain name, which will be publicly launched in July 2010. (http://www.cointernet.co/domain/become-co-founder http://www.cointernet.co/domain/become-co-founder) Maybe it is registered under the program's name instead of the actual registrant to ensure registrants under the program stick with their originally-submitted plan. Or at least they can't turn around and change it to a domain parked ad page. Or perhaps the whois registrant name will be changed after the public launch.
- SkyMarshal 16y agoInteresting 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?
- zavulon 16y agoYeah I was wondering the same thing... After reading their website though, I got the impression cointernet.co guys are trying too hard to convince how much of a hit .co will be. Also, isn't there a plan in the works to make everything and a kitchen sink as their own .tld?
- TeHCrAzY 16y agoI think you are referring to the custom TLD's, which are currently available, if you have the huge amounts of money to acquire one.
- chaosmachine 16y ago.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.
- what 16y ago> .co is a huge opportunity for squatters. You can get them at under a $1 per domain too if you bulk order them. But since it's a pre-order, the people who pay $300 get priority. I don't understand why they don't auction off the obviously desirable domains, like they're doing with the 1 letter domains.
- SkyMarshal 16y agoIt sounds like any domain that has more than one pre-registrant will be auctioned. If you're the only one who request a particular domain, you get it cheap though.
- sbierwagen 16y agoAny reason Twitter just doesn't let you use HTML anchors, and skip this whole mess?
- cmelbye 16y agoThat would be incredibly unhelpful. It's much more to type, it's yet another thing to sanitize, and most users don't know HTML.
- philwelch 16y agoI wonder when some tiny country will decide to just turn their entire top-level national TLD into a url shortener.
- fliph 16y ago.tk already did this: http://dot.tk/ http://dot.tk/
- dboyd 16y agoThis has been done: http://to./ http://to./ HN: http://to./4dw2 http://to./4dw2 Note that the 'dot' (in to.) is necessary to make the hostname absolute, so it doesn't fail in pretty much every browser. Otherwise, the URL should just be: http://to/ http://to/
- known 16y agohttp://to./ http://to./ urls are not recognized by twitter.
- aditya 16y agoNote: As Raffi clarified, this isn't a "shortener" but a "wrapper" http://twitter.com/twitterapi/status/15739646901 http://twitter.com/twitterapi/status/15739646901 and http://twitter.com/twitterapi/status/15739827266 http://twitter.com/twitterapi/status/15739827266
- Tichy 16y agoBla Blubb. Of course it is an URL shortener.
- cynicalkane 16y agoBla Blubb. Of course it is an URL shortener. I would vote this up were it not for "Bla Blubb". I have no idea what that is supposed to say.
- Tichy 16y agoIt's supposed to say that Twitter is just babbling to hide the fact that it is simply a URL shortener.
- bonaldi 16y ago"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.
- tdavis 16y agoSo 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.
- aditya 16y agoGeneric shortened URLs are becoming a plague upon the web and are marginally useful at best outside of Twitter Marginally useful at best outside of Twitter? Care to explain? Less than 1% of bitly's traffic is coming from twtitter, so obviously there are other people that find value in trackable URLs... I'm curious why you think it isn't useful?
- india 16y agoURL shortners break the web in many ways. Link rot, link hijack, it takes longer to reach the page, additional point of failure and domain based algorithms break. In other words, plague.
- jamesbritt 16y ago
- dolphenstein 16y agoWhy not just do a direct link and just shorten the anchor text? Bypass all this t.co crap.
- briansmith 16y agoBesides URL shorteners being totally unnecessary, this just slows down users' browsing and diminishes their privacy. Basically, every Twitter app will have to become Spyware in order to comply with Twitter's new ToS. FWIW, Here are my messages to the Twitter developer list about it: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/msg/103fa01c26ecbd55 http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/msg/... http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/msg/c230ab4054b6536a http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/msg/... I think it is disgusting how Twitter has appropriated the old post-9/11 "we're spying on you for for own safety" stance that governments have been terrorizing citizens with. Basically, their spyware is protecting you from...other spyware. All for a fraction of a fraction of a penny per click. Also note that their t.co shortener will create links that are 19 characters long. But, j.mp links are only 18 characters long, which means t.co links won't even be as short as possible. So, it's worse all around.
- samaparicio 16y agoInstead of all this complexity, why not simply NOT COUNT the characters of any URL? There is no reason anymore for 140 characters.
- thegyppo 16y agoQuestion is, will they start redirecting shortened links via affiliates to generate additional revenue?
- dtsingletary 16y agoI think URL shorteners are cool, and all the rage, but: - I remember when del.icio.us/ came out. Not that it's a shortener, but they all have this clever naming crap. When you're not able to click the link, it's awfully hard to remember-- okay, did the first period come after the first three letters? What's the bottom domain, again? How do you even spell delicious? Did they spell it right? - There's an implicit trust that must be made before expecting a user to click on any shortened URL. Since you can't follow it through to the content without actually clicking on it, there's no way of knowing whether you're headed to a clever browser hijack (or worse)! - Which brings us to the work-safe barrier that most everyone who works a real job has. Websense, in most cases, blocks anything that's streaming media, TV, porn, advertisements, gambling, etc. etc. etc. And then it logs it, and it logs which user accesses it. When I'm at work, I'm pretty judicious-- I don't want to be recorded as clicking on YouTube links, or listening to Kanye West's latest gaffe, let alone going to Facebook or Myspace. URL shortners completely obfuscate where the link is taking you-- so the damage is done without you even knowing what choice you make. Therefore, unless I'm absolutely certain it came from someone I know, and it's specified what it is, I'm not clicking that shit. Which brings us back to implicit trust. Most people don't check the links first, or even do this 'trust check' before they click on links. How long until we see, "Woman fired for watching Jack Johnson video on company time?" (accidentally, of course). It shouldn't be that way, but it will be before too long.
- fseek 16y agoWhat a way to kill bit.ly and others....