Twitter Switches From TinyURL To Bit.ly

http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-switches-from-tinyurl-to-bitly-2009-5

by coglethorpe • 17 years ago

19 19 17 years ago

Tichy• 17 years ago

bit.ly has one drawback: a proliferation of bit.ly URLs pointing to the same URL, because every user can get an individual abbreviation.

That makes reverse lookups infeasible (get tinyurl for url, search twitter for tinyurl - see who links to you). At least with tinyurl most abbreviations were the same.

Kadin2• 17 years ago

Interesting choice of TLD. I can only assume this means they'll be sure to conform to all relevant Libyan law, since it only takes one court order to pull their domain registration. (Cf. http://nic.ly/regulations.php)

dryicerx• 17 years 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)

axod3• 17 years ago

Agreed. 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.

callahad2• 17 years ago

The 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?

axod3• 17 years ago

Why don't they just make their own? Seems like keeping that data 'in house' would be wise.

coglethorpe• 17 years ago

"Bit.LY is a portfolio company of Betaworks, which is also an investor in Twitter"

From the perspective of the investors, they are keeping it "in house" By pairing work of two investments, they make both a little stronger (well, bitly a lot stronger).

axod3• 17 years ago

Hoping some of the hype of twitter might rub off on bit.ly I'd say if I was skeptical. Still amazing bit.ly got funded.

callahad2• 17 years ago

Why does Twitter need URL shorteners at all?

Kadin2• 17 years ago

Well, there's an argument to be made for them, when including the full URL in a message would cause it to exceed the SMS character limit.

However, there's no reason to use one (and lots of reasons not to) when the URL doesn't break the 140-character limit, or when the message isn't going out via the SMS gateway.

I'm not holding my breath for Twitter to implement such logic, though; they seem to have a truly unhealthy fascination with URL shorteners.

antirez• 17 years ago

> Breaking news from the red-hot world of URL shorteners.

I don't know if the goal of the author was that but after the first sentence of the article I was laughing like a mad :)

tolmasky• 17 years ago

What's particularly silly about all this is that when using the website to tweet you by definition do not need a URL shortener. You are not allowed to type more than 140 characters in the input field, so your message is necessarily already under 140 chars, so the shortening does nothing. I find this particularly frustrating since I have a message with a perfectly legible URL, hit send, and all of a sudden its a short URL that now one know where it goes anymore. If it auto shortened your URL as you pasted it in (as opposed to after hitting reply/send), then it would at least allow to type more, but as it is, the auto shortening serves no user-purpose.

FlorinAndrei• 17 years ago

I just use http://is.gd/ when twittering. Shorter by one character. ;-)

Twitter Switches From TinyURL To Bit.ly

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