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So the question has to be asked, what does twitter get from a "vibrant" marketplace of url shorteners? Digg is only the first to try and use the links to their

So the question has to be asked, what does twitter get from a "vibrant" marketplace of url shorteners? Digg is only the first to try and use the links to their advantage. These other services are going to need to pay the bills, and we'll start seeing more and more of these stories. They've got the capital, twitter either needs to buy a url shortener, or at least play kingmaker and push one service.

mustpax 17y ago
They should just fold the functionality into their API. Add an optional URL field to each tweet, and then within the message the URL can be referenced using Markdown like syntax: [link body][1]. Only the link body text would count against your character count, so you get a free URL. They could even sell the click-through analytics to their large customers. URL shorteners are a hack, there's no reason to encourage them any further.
- potatolicious 17y ago
  Precisely. I have no idea why we can't do this - Twitter already supports # and @, there's no reason they can't support URLs in the same manner.
mcav 17y ago
Twitter should just obviate the need for URL shorteners, and make URLs take up only a certain number of characters for the tweet. Then, display them through HTML with ellipsis or something, but keep the HREF pointing to the real thing.
jonknee 17y ago
Why would they have to buy one? It's an incredibly simple thing to create. It would take more work to buy one and integrate it into their system/API than just create it from scratch.
- DanHulton 17y ago
  Let me guess... it would only take about a weekend, right? All snark aside, putting together something as rich as bit.ly is NOT an incredibly simple thing to create. And twitter will need to incorporate such functionality in there, or people WILL find ways to use their favourites to get the functionality they're used to.
  - jonknee 17y ago
    Most people will just use the default. TinyURL used to be the default, now it's Bit.ly. If they made a basic (TinyURL style) shortener it would be more popular than Bit.ly over night. The way they have done the default has always bugged me--they don't shorten URLs as you type them so if you're over 140 characters it won't shorten, but if your message is under 140 characters it sometimes (only sometimes) shortens the URL. Which is unnecessary and annoying, if the space is there why not show the full URL?
  - jerf 17y ago
    "Let me guess... it would only take about a weekend, right?" Making a functional link redirector? Yes, absolutely. There are frameworks that you could toss something together with in an hour that would scale enough for most people's purposes. With some frameworks you can get pretty close to true internet-scale scalability in a weekend. (I'd think Yaws and Erlang here.) I've seen framework tutorials use this as the demo, and, again, we're talking things that can get awfully close to internet scale without much work. Making all the stuff that apparently surround link redirectors in some desperate attempt to make it "monetizable"? It would take longer, but unlike the case for "replicating Stack Overflow" where all the extra stuff is the real value and will take more than a weekend, that's all extra stuff that nobody really cares about very much in this case. A page that takes a URL, returns a URL, and does nothing else really is enough for the vast majority of uses. It's a different class of problem. This truly is a fundamentally trivial problem. I personally see no reasonable way to "monetize" this trivial service, because the market value of a URL synonym is going to trend very strongly towards zero due to effectively infinite supply. (Much as your point was that it's hard to recreate bit.ly rather than the weekend snark, note my point is more that doing that is a waste of time, mostly-crap features done to benefit the redirector, not the user, and that this truly is easy to recreate enough to drive supply sky-high.)
jgilliam 17y ago
They're pushing bit.ly pretty hard, it's the default.

mustpax 17y ago

They should just fold the functionality into their API. Add an optional URL field to each tweet, and then within the message the URL can be referenced using Markdown like syntax: [link body][1]. Only the link body text would count against your character count, so you get a free URL. They could even sell the click-through analytics to their large customers. URL shorteners are a hack, there's no reason to encourage them any further.

potatolicious 17y ago
Precisely. I have no idea why we can't do this - Twitter already supports # and @, there's no reason they can't support URLs in the same manner.

mcav 17y ago

Twitter should just obviate the need for URL shorteners, and make URLs take up only a certain number of characters for the tweet. Then, display them through HTML with ellipsis or something, but keep the HREF pointing to the real thing.

jonknee 17y ago

Why would they have to buy one? It's an incredibly simple thing to create. It would take more work to buy one and integrate it into their system/API than just create it from scratch.

DanHulton 17y ago
Let me guess... it would only take about a weekend, right? All snark aside, putting together something as rich as bit.ly is NOT an incredibly simple thing to create. And twitter will need to incorporate such functionality in there, or people WILL find ways to use their favourites to get the functionality they're used to.
- jonknee 17y ago
  Most people will just use the default. TinyURL used to be the default, now it's Bit.ly. If they made a basic (TinyURL style) shortener it would be more popular than Bit.ly over night. The way they have done the default has always bugged me--they don't shorten URLs as you type them so if you're over 140 characters it won't shorten, but if your message is under 140 characters it sometimes (only sometimes) shortens the URL. Which is unnecessary and annoying, if the space is there why not show the full URL?
- jerf 17y ago
  "Let me guess... it would only take about a weekend, right?" Making a functional link redirector? Yes, absolutely. There are frameworks that you could toss something together with in an hour that would scale enough for most people's purposes. With some frameworks you can get pretty close to true internet-scale scalability in a weekend. (I'd think Yaws and Erlang here.) I've seen framework tutorials use this as the demo, and, again, we're talking things that can get awfully close to internet scale without much work. Making all the stuff that apparently surround link redirectors in some desperate attempt to make it "monetizable"? It would take longer, but unlike the case for "replicating Stack Overflow" where all the extra stuff is the real value and will take more than a weekend, that's all extra stuff that nobody really cares about very much in this case. A page that takes a URL, returns a URL, and does nothing else really is enough for the vast majority of uses. It's a different class of problem. This truly is a fundamentally trivial problem. I personally see no reasonable way to "monetize" this trivial service, because the market value of a URL synonym is going to trend very strongly towards zero due to effectively infinite supply. (Much as your point was that it's hard to recreate bit.ly rather than the weekend snark, note my point is more that doing that is a waste of time, mostly-crap features done to benefit the redirector, not the user, and that this truly is easy to recreate enough to drive supply sky-high.)

jgilliam 17y ago

They're pushing bit.ly pretty hard, it's the default.