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All very excellent points, and I'd like to add one more: URL shorteners came into existence because of a need in the market. Removing this need will pretty much
by pierrefar 16y ago
All very excellent points, and I'd like to add one more: URL shorteners came into existence because of a need in the market. Removing this need will pretty much kill all shorteners. All articles on this topic I've seen miss this point entirely. They dive into why URL shorteners are bad but ignore why they're here, i.e. how they provide real benefits to their users.
Some history:
1. TinyURL was started because emails had a character limit per line (Campaign Monitor suggests 65 characters, but it's more than that: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2075/update-recommended-width-for-t/ http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2075/update-recomme...).
2. When Twitter came along, there was a massive need to squeeze in a URL in a small space, and tinyurl.com is just too long. At the same time, 2-letter ccTLDs became very easily accessible to the average hacker, and the market exploded.
IMHO, this is all Twitter's fault. They should have seen the massive usage of URL shorteners early on and created their own or changed the way the 140-char limit is calculated. t.co is coming late, but better late than never.
The final need in the market is analytics. Social media link sharing is mostly about creating a link on a website you don't own (like Twitter) that points to another website you don't own (like google.com or nytimes.com or the BBC). How do you know if anyone cared?
My hope for t.co is that it will have real-time good analytics built in to help marketers. Otherwise, they'll all keep using bit.ly or Cligs or home-grown shorteners. This is a genuine need that won't go away for now.
My point is simple: if you don't like URL shorteners, don't just bash them but fix the underlying cause instead.
Disclosure: I built Cligs and sold it late last year.
- ThomPete 16y agoExcellent points. With regards to this being twitters fault. Twitter was originally thought of as a SMS broadcast service where friends and families update each other on where they where. It wasn't until much later that it became a link recommendation powerhouse. This happened when twitter became more of a professional tool, unlike Facebook. So it's perhaps a little harsh to claim it's their fault. But otherwise I agree with our points completely.
- pierrefar 16y agoYeah you're right, probably a touch too harsh. A better phrasing would be they should have reacted faster when they saw just how important URL shorteners were becoming. Mind you, they were focused on eradicating the fail whale so even then the fault is due to other things being more important.
- ROFISH 16y agoHere's my question: If Twitter is replacing all links with their t.co AND including the full URL in the API, why doesn't the API just put the full URL in most "full" versions (web, RSS, API) and only use the shorturl on extreme bandwidth situations like SMS (or arguably a very compressed mobile API.) It will break the holy 140 characters, but as you said, the reason for the shortener is because the 140 limit.
- pierrefar 16y agoHaving both is very good. Look at what Backtype does with their Twitter search API. The HTML of each tweet will have its links be: <a href="FULL_URL">SHORT_URL</a> I think that's perfect because I know which URL shortener was used and can follow up if needed (e.g. check the bit.ly analytics). What you're proposing would support exactly this scenario, and as a marketer of my web apps myself, I like. But their ToS changes the OP mentioned go exactly against that, and I don't like.