11 ms·
Bit.ly offering even shorter j.mp URLs
- jonknee 17y ago"By knocking out two characters from the URL, that means your tweet content can potentially be 1.4% longer." It's sad that this isn't intentionally a satirical statement.
- truebosko 17y agoAgreed. I know there are some issues with people who uses Twitter via SMS but I figured by now they would found an intuitive way to ignore URL's in Tweets.
- riffic 17y agometadata such as urls do not belong inside the message body when they can be attached to a separate field per tweet. this can even be expanded; get other useful data such as gps location or hashtags out of the body and into a metadata field.
- steveklabnik 17y agoI often recieve tweets via SMS, and then just type the bit.ly link in, because that's easier than opening up the page of whoever tweeted it and clicking the link.
- helveticaman 17y agoI think it's an incremental improvement. It won't make or break bit.ly, but a hundred such improvements will make it a success.
- trezor 17y agoI can't wait until this gets included in the Long URL Please FireFox-extension. My new favourite addon since this nonsense started. For reference: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9549?version=0.4.1 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9549?version=...
- windsurfer 17y agoI would like my user agent to fetch everything beyond a shortened URL automatically as a sort of protest to skew the stat counting results.
- IncidentalEcon 17y agoI confess to knowing very little about the limitations of URLs so perhaps this is s dumb question: why not go all the way down to the shortest possible? Can they just use the minimum unique string of characters? For example http://xyz7g http://xyz7g. What are the limits?
- there 17y agowell you have to have a valid domain name, and xyz7g is not one.
- figital 17y agotwitter could have easily implemented some kind of even shorter system by using some kind of rarely-used hash tag character like this: Check out this link : ±xyz7g Which would be auto-parsed to http://bit.ly/xyz7g http://bit.ly/xyz7g. That would save 13 characters.
- AndrewDucker 17y agoYou need a domain name, a period, a top level domain, a slash and then an address at that domain. The shortest top level domains are the country ones - which are two characters long. The shortest domain name on top of that would be one character. So http://j.mp/Whatever http://j.mp/Whatever is in fact the shortest you can get.
- thorax 17y agoNote that silly services like ours ( http://tinyarro.ws http://tinyarro.ws ) further compress the character length by using unicode after the / so the URLs never grow beyond 3 characters (and can do 2 characters for a very long time).
- jballanc 17y agoLast time I checked, even though the web front end counts characters, the Twitter back end counts bytes (as does, I believe, SMS). So unicode doesn't actually save anything (for twitter).
- Erwin 17y agoYou can go even shorter with help of one of the TLD registrars, e.g. http://dk./ http://dk./ is a working URL -- you may skip that dot in Firefox and use http://dk/ http://dk/ (Opera will assume you're confused and try to use dk.com).
- aw3c2 17y agohttp://ai/ http://ai/ is my favourite
- DannoHung 17y agoI never use URL shorteners in my tweets. I just figure out what the URL without all the extra shit is.
- slig 17y agoToo bad that twitter shorten the urls you liking it or not.
- lhorie 17y agoWhat's novel about this? 3.ly has been offering 8 char URLs for a while.
- byrneseyeview 17y agoGeopolitical hedging.
- chasingsparks 17y agoSeeing JMP, I experienced a flash of x86 asm panic.
- nader 17y agowhat the f*ck?
- shughes 17y agoURLs for Twitter are facing the same problem that transistors are facing. People are going to have to start parallel tweeting.
- shughes 17y agoSigh.. That joke sucked.
- TweedHeads 17y agoHow about replacing http:// http:// by a universally accepted unicode char so we can save 7 more chars? Pick yours...