3 ms·

What bothers me as someone who works with web standards is that these URL tracking services should have been fundamentally rejected as they're only used for tra

What bothers me as someone who works with web standards is that these URL tracking services should have been fundamentally rejected as they're only used for tracking and completely unnecessary. Additionally, they're not actually part of web technology due to Twitter's ToS... I run a web crawling company (http://www.datastreamer.io/ http://www.datastreamer.io/) and we license data to other companies based on what we crawl. This really opens up some weird situations for us... If a URL is copied and shared OUTSIDE of Twitter but behind a t.co URL you can't access it without agreeing to their ToS even though the link might be to the nytimes or some other service. I was initially upset about the GDPR but I'm starting to see the light of day here. You can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't both be on the Internet but then put up an insane ToS claiming you have rights that restrain Internet users. It's like standing on the street corner and yelling and then saying everyone around you owes you royalties because they're hearing your copyrighted speech.

mrep 8y ago
> You can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't both be on the Internet but then put up an insane ToS claiming you have rights that restrain Internet users. Can you explain that further because you pretty much to have to have a ToS if you don't want to get sued to death for any moderately sized website? The WWW is not a complete free for all.
pacifika 8y ago
They might be unnecessary in this case but not always. For example I used to work with elearning materials which did outbound linking to other materials, which might change, or be on services not under our control. Being able to manage the link endpoint without having to republish the materials is a big win for time/effort and sometimes is just not possible.
- zrobotics 8y ago
  As an end-user of similar types of materials: no, I will emphatically state that using a link shortener makes the material worse. If you don't update the link and it points to a broken page, at least the URL normally has enough information for me to Google the underlying material. A shortened link loses all of that context.

mrep 8y ago

> You can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't both be on the Internet but then put up an insane ToS claiming you have rights that restrain Internet users. Can you explain that further because you pretty much to have to have a ToS if you don't want to get sued to death for any moderately sized website? The WWW is not a complete free for all.

pacifika 8y ago

They might be unnecessary in this case but not always. For example I used to work with elearning materials which did outbound linking to other materials, which might change, or be on services not under our control. Being able to manage the link endpoint without having to republish the materials is a big win for time/effort and sometimes is just not possible.

zrobotics 8y ago
As an end-user of similar types of materials: no, I will emphatically state that using a link shortener makes the material worse. If you don't update the link and it points to a broken page, at least the URL normally has enough information for me to Google the underlying material. A shortened link loses all of that context.