So the Internet is (was on April 3rd) ablaze with the talk of how bad URL shorteners are ever since Joshua Schachter, the guy that built and sold del.icio.us, jotted down his thoughts on them.
These facts are nothing new and, I’ll bet, do not allude those that built these services. But, they see a general use and purpose for these services and decided to provide their own solution to the problem.
The problem is that, in some cases, you need a shorter URL than the one provided by a particular Web site. Web sites with incredibly long URLs (like Amazon, Google Maps, or search results on a site) can be cumbersome to deal with in situations like writing email, Twittering (I’m cdevroe by the way), and sending SMS messages. URL shorteners attempt to solve this problem by creating links to these pages much easier by providing a significantly shorter URL that simply redirects to the URL that you chose.
Seems innocent enough. Seems simple enough. However, by creating a shorter URL that represents a longer one you’re, as Joshua states, adding unneeded layers that could potentially fail overtime. If the URL shortening service manages 1,000,000 redirects, and suddenly goes down, those redirects no longer work. This is a big problem.
For services like Twitter, which benefit greatly from these URL shortening services due to their short message limit, they stand to have millions and millions of dead links. Right now, by default, Twitter uses TinyURL to automatically shorten URLs to help them fit into the 140 character limit for SMS messages. Jason Kottke suggested that Twitter create its own URL shortening service so that they can guarantee it be around forever and to replace all of the short URLs it had created in the past. I’m going to go one step further and suggest that they buy Bit.ly.
While Twitter has chosen to use TinyURL I believe this was because Bit.ly wasn’t around when they added the TinyURL functionality. Bit.ly is more on par with Twitter’s real-time efforts. Twitter would immediately get their own URL shortening service that has, on top of it, a very good statistics package to show how those links are being used, where they are clicked on from, how many people clicked them, and a service that has a good API.
8 Comments
I agree!
I love bit.ly, and I’ll specifically go to the website to create a custom short URL on my profile — TweetDeck doesn’t currently allow custom short URLs or saving them to my profile, but if Twitter bought bit.ly, then maybe those would be features of the Twitter API; my Twitter account is linked with my bit.ly account.
So do I. And, if Twitter bought Bit.ly I do not think that applications that used Twitter would need to use any other URL shortener because, well, it’d be built into Twitter’s API.
Couldn’t help but love the irony of Twitter’s default tinyurl getting thown in.
http://twitter.com/cdevroe/status/1471757510
I haven’t used bit.ly enough to weigh in on this one but, I’m definitely going to check it out.
I was so hoping that someone would mention that.
I’ve never used bit.ly I guess that’s because I just went with TinyURL when it came out, and then is.gd because it has less character than bit.ly, and we all know that characters are what matters, especially in Twitter haha
Good point. That one character may come in handy. But, if Twitter bought Bit.ly they could make the URLs as short as they wanted to. Like li.nk/1 or something. Just use the Bit.ly engine underneath.
Bit.ly rules! I am working on a blog post about it, hope to have it up in the next few days. It would be sweet if Twitter bought it, the stats are the killer feature. I use it for 4 twitter accounts that I manage, won’t use any other URL-shortening service now
Nice. Looking forward to seeing the post Jacob.
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[...] DiggBar, as you can see from the example URL I gave, also acts as a way to shorten a URL. You can read some of my general thoughts about URL shorteners here. This makes it easy for people to share these DiggBar-wrapped URLs on sites like Twitter (I’m [...]