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Every time I hear something about URL shortners, a part of me dies inside. My Thoughts: Twitter is the main reason for the increase in URL Shortners. Instead o
by dryicerx 17y ago
Every time I hear something about URL shortners, a part of me dies inside.
My Thoughts: Twitter is the main reason for the increase in URL Shortners. Instead of depending on outside services, Twitter should (must) implement their own shortning service. Something like !02u389 or ^02u389 that maps to a real URL. (like their #hastags and @replies)
- axod 17y agoAgreed. And if they did roll their own, they could do nice things like hover over a short url and it'll show you the destination url. That sort of thing is easier when you're running both parts of the system.
- callahad 17y agoThe thing is, none of this is necessary. HTML has a built in URL shortener: <a href="http://example.com/long">Short</a> There you go. Twitter is already parsing URLs out of tweets in order to feed them through bit.ly. At that point, the length of the URL isn't relevant -- it's been turned into a single token and pulled from the tweet. Why don't we just stop there instead of first stopping off at the shortener before writing our HTML?
- lsb 17y agoThat doesn't work as a text message.
- tlrobinson 17y agoDo people actually use SMS with Twitter any more?
- bobbyi 17y agoIf you are in a situation where you can only receive messages via text, then you aren't able to visit web pages. So they could replace the urls with "[url]" or somesuch when sending them via SMS.
- ks 17y agoMobile phones can do both. Not all phones are connected to the internet all the time, so it would make sense to receive twitter messages using SMS, and then connect to the net.
- furyg3 17y agoWell, for most everybody it does, actually (sending back-to-back SMSes). Maybe some providers/phones don't implement these things properly, but these are specific situations which should be handled in a different way. I like Twitter's character limit for shaping the communication, but URLs shouldn't be included in the character count. Ideally, the receiver should send their short message with an HTML link, and Twitter should figure out what to do with that based on the receiver's capabilities and preferences. That may include sending the full HTML, a bit.ly version, dropping it altogether, or breaking it up into multiple SMSes. If you're using SMS with Twitter, then they have your cell phone number and (thus) know your provider, so this isn't a monumental task. This all makes me wonder: if you have an SMS enabled phone which is capable of following URLs in a browser, can't Twitter just SMS you a link to the full tweet (HTML links and all)? If not, just fucking drop the URLs since they're useless anyway.