However, this causes some problems when trying to copy/paste a tweet. See the screenshot of this tweet.

If you try to copy/paste that Tweet you’ll end up getting an unusable URL. Perhaps Twitter should throw the 140 character limit out of the window on the tweet permalinks to make the full URL visible. This would make it easier to copy/paste but also simple to see whether or not the URL you are clicking on will lead to a Web page, a PDF file, an MP3 file, etc.

My thoughts on URL shortening services are pretty public but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have a need for them. I prefer Bit.ly over any other URL shortening services that I’ve used to-date.

With Tr.im dying I thought that there was always the possibility of Bit.ly going down the same path. It was time to create my own URL shortening service for short URLs pointing to my site using my own domain. I browsed around, found two WordPress plugins that could have been candidates – but ultimately decided to use nothing but vanilla WordPress.

The Short URL plugin makes it very easy to take any URL and make it nice a short, track clicks, etc. I have this installed in case I want to shorten URLs that are not ultimately here on my site. (Though I still plan on using Bit.ly for these links). Short Post URLs is a plugin that seemingly does exactly what I want – which is make a shorter URL automatically for every post here on my site. However, the problem is that by default the plugin does not redirect from the short URL to the long one. This means that my posts would have two URLs. This isn’t what I was looking for and I didn’t want to hack someone else’s plugin.

That is when I saw it, right under my nose. The default link for any post on any WordPress blog is domain.com?p=postID. For instance, the short URL for this post is http://cdevroe.com/?p=2682. If you link to that URL WordPress will automatically forward that request to the full URL. Simple. Beautiful. Exactly what I need.

Occam’s Razor in full effect.

Update: Dean Robinson, maker of the fine mobile Twitter client Hahlo, suggests in the comments adding a simple line to your .htaccess file (if you’re so inclined) to pretty up your URLs. I’ve decided to add this for mine so that now both the original, default WordPress URL of ?p=postID works as well as /p/postID works now. Thanks Dean.

Scaling Bit.ly to keep up with the demands of Twitter, since Twitter is growing at a remarkable rate, is an obvious concern. Will Twitter buy Bit.ly to help scale/fund it? I hope they do. Not only because I like Bit.ly – but because then I could say I told you so.

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.