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programming and human factors
by Jeff Atwood
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Is anyone else as sick as I am of all the mainstream news coverage on Twitter? Don't get me wrong, I'm a Twitter fan, and I've been a user since 2006. To me, it's a form of public instant messaging -- yet another way to maximize the value of my keystrokes. Still, I'm a little perplexed as to the media's near-obsession with the service. If a day goes by now without the New York Times or CNN mentioning Twitter in some way, I become concerned. Am I really getting all the news? Or just the stupid, too long, non-140-character version of the news?
I guess I should be pleased that I was a (relatively) early adopter and advocate of software that has achieved the rarest of feats in the software industry -- critical mass. Adoption by the proverbial "average user". Whatever you may think of Twitter, consider this: as a software developer, you'll be fortunate to build one project that achieves critical mass in your entire life. And even then, only if you are a very, very lucky programmer: in the right place, at the right time, with the right idea, working with the right people. Most of us never get there. I don't think I will.
There is one side effect of this unprecedented popularity, though, that I definitely wouldn't have predicted: the mainstreaming of URL shortening services. You can barely use Twitter without being forced into near-mastery of URL shortening. For example, this is the super-secret, patented formula I often use when composing my Twitter messages:
"brief summary or opinion" [link for more detail]
Twitter only allows 140 characters in each status update. Some might view this as a limitation, but I consider it Twitter's best feature. I am all for enforced brevity. Maybe that's due to the pain of living through a lifetime of emfail. But depending on the size of the comment and the URL (and some URLs can be ridiculously long), I can't quite fit everything in there without sounding like an SMS-addled teenage girl. This is where URL shortening comes in.
Now, I know what you're thinking. You're a clever programmer. You could implement some kind of fancy jQuery callback to shorten the URL, and replace the longer URL with the shorter URL right there in the text as the user pauses in typing. But you don't even have to be that clever; most of the URL shortening services (that aren't in their infancy) deliver a rather predictable size for the URLs they return. You could simply estimate the size of the URL post-shortening -- maybe adding 1 character as a fudge factor for safety -- and allow the update.
Twitter, I can assure you, is far more brain damaged than you can possibly imagine. It will indeed shorten URLs that fit in the 140 character limit (whoopee!), but it does nothing for URLs that don't fit -- it will not allow you to submit the message. All part of its endearing charm.
Lame, yes, but it means that the typical, mainstream browser-based Twitter user is forced to become proficient with URL shortening services. Due to the increased exposure they've enjoyed through Twitter's meteoric rise to fame, the number of URL shortening services has exploded, and rapidly evolved -- they're no longer viewed as utility services to make URLs more convenient, but a way to subjugate, control, and perhaps worst of all, "monetize" the web experience.
This is dangerous territory we're veering into now, as Joshua Schachter explains.
So there are clear benefits for both the service (low cost of entry, potentially easy profit) and the linker (the quick rush of popularity). But URL shorteners are bad for the rest of us.The worst problem is that shortening services add another layer of indirection to an already creaky system. A regular hyperlink implicates a browser, its DNS resolver, the publisher's DNS server, and the publisher's website. With a shortening service, you're adding something that acts like a third DNS resolver, except one that is assembled out of unvetted PHP and MySQL, without the benevolent oversight of luminaries like Dan Kaminsky and St. Postel.
The web is little more than a maze of hyperlinks, and if you can insert yourself as an intermediary in that maze, you can transform or undermine the experience in fundamental ways. Consider the disturbing directions newer URL shortening services are taking:
Believe it: the humble hyperlink, thanks to pervasive URL shortening, can now be wielded as a weapon. The internet is the house that PageRank built, and it's all predicated on hyperlinks. Once you start making every link your special flavor of "shortened" link, framing the target content -- heck, maybe wrapping it in a few ads for good measure -- you've completely turned that system on its head.
What's aggravating to me is that the current situation is completely accidental. If Twitter had provided a sane way to link a single word, none of these weaselly URL shortening clones would have reared their ugly heads at all. Consider how simple it is to decouple the hyperlink from the display text in, say, phpBB, or Markdown, or even good old HTML markup itself:
<a href="http://example.com">foo</a> [url=http://example.com]foo[/url] [foo](http://example.com)
Every tiny URL is another baby step towards destroying the web as we know it. Which is exactly what you'd want to do if you're attempting to build a business on top of the ruins. Personally, I'd prefer to see the big, objective search engines who naturally sit at the center of the web offer their own URL shortening services. Who better to generate short hashes of every possible URL than the companies who already have cached copies of every URL on the internet, anyway?
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First!
ZiG on June 16, 2009 5:23 AMI think there should be some webservice that makes it easy to add real semantics into the web.
Silvercode on June 16, 2009 5:23 AMHave you been following any of the rev=canonical discussion? See, for example, http://simonwillison.net/2009/Apr/11/revcanonical/ or http://shiflett.org/blog/2009/apr/save-the-internet-with-rev-canonical.
Briefly, the idea is that sites should control their own URL shortening, thus side-stepping some of the problems that you describe.
Angus McIntyre on June 16, 2009 5:45 AMAre there security implications to the growing popularity of URL shortening services? E.g. users become familiar with tinyurl.com etc. and start to trust it as a host when in fact a cracker could be using the service to redirect to their malicious website. And of course there's no way of seeing where you're going to end up without navigating the link (is there?)..
Rob on June 16, 2009 5:54 AMSurely the more worrying problem is that Twitter becomes useless to researchers in the future when all the URL services are dead and no one knows who you linked to? Twitter should start storing the full URL or provide its own service. And the URL shorteners should be open about their databases too, to put them in escrow.
MJ on June 16, 2009 6:02 AMWhat "sane" way to link a word would be more character efficient than what we have in Twitter now? All the code you introduce with HTML or phpBB or Markdown adds a lot of extra characters. That 140-character limit isn't a display limit, but a data transmission limit. (Likely based on the 160-character data+headers limit of SMS.)
As for your suggestion of search engines generating "short hashes" for every URL, you yourself answered that in your previous entry -- the hashes would be too long! Not every URL will ever need a short version, so the current iterative schemes, combined with an ever-changing variety of domains providing the service, is much more space-efficient.
rfunk on June 16, 2009 6:03 AMStopped reading after the first 140 characters. Was it good? :P
Jorge on June 16, 2009 6:05 AMThere are some Firefox extensions that deal with the problem of shortened URLs. The one that I currently use is NoRedirect, which lets me force a "preview" layer on all of the shortened URL services.
(https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/11787)
DataMan on June 16, 2009 6:07 AMI thinks its a bit alarmist. The web was supposed to fall apart years ago.
webprofessor on June 16, 2009 6:14 AMThere is also a great userscript (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/40582) for converting shortened URLs, it support far over 80 services.
SaturnPolly on June 16, 2009 6:14 AM@Rob TinyURL offers a preview service to check links before you visit them: http://tinyurl.com/preview.php
Anders Sandvig on June 16, 2009 6:19 AMtl;dr :) BTW, on a similar note, you number-based archive URLs really suck. You should have the date and the post title in there.
DrWatson on June 16, 2009 6:27 AMSomehow,
i should not be surprised that the king of "Keep It Short and Simple" has doen a complete u-turn and is spouting vitriol over the one service that does keep it short and simple.
however, i reluctantly have to agree. this shortening thing has added a complexity to our lives that was/is unnecessary. i agree, let shortening be the province and problem of search engines. that said, are we willing to live in a walled garden of our search engines? only today i realized that the search results google has been giving me are biased by the previous websites i have visited. that is soooo annoying becausse that way, i might never see what else is out there. especially since the option to set 100 search results was removed!!
there should be some sort of compromise. i think jeff was on to something there with the hyperlink idea. but before we all latch onto an idea, consider the repercussions. i hate being walled in.
jake on June 16, 2009 6:28 AMWe should probably keep in mind that a "shortened URL" is not truly a locator for what you really want to get to. It's a link to some service that just happens to let you on through to somewhere else ... with possibly other effects. A shortened URL and an "original" URL shouldn't be regarded as synonymous.
BH on June 16, 2009 6:34 AMFYI: There are services out there (like LongURL - http://longurl.org/) which try to take care of the de-shortification. You can also make a Yahoo Pipe (as I describe on my blog: http://hype-free.blogspot.com/2009/03/update-to-deshortify-pipe.html) which takes arbitrary text (twitter posts in the example) and passes them trough the "de-shortification" process.
In related news: a smaller short-url provider (Cligs) has been hacked and for a short time all the URL's were redirecting to a single page (luckily it seems that the given page wasn't malicious). http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2009/06/cligs.html
PS. I miss the orange captcha :-)
Cd-MaN on June 16, 2009 6:38 AMI never thought of url-shorteners this way. I think you've got a big point.
Cheers from Argentina.
you forgot qzip.in ... public link tracking. just what we all need - for our friends to see the traffic stats from our links.
Nickb on June 16, 2009 6:48 AMI think that tinyurl is good only to rickroll people, or to share www.name.surname.homo.com
Dzamir on June 16, 2009 6:50 AMTwitter can fix this, all they need to do is get the metadata out of the message. Metadata such as url, hashtags, gps location or who you @reply makes more sense as an additional field separate from the message.
riffic on June 16, 2009 6:56 AMWeird timing on this one. I'd been writing on this very topic but my view is very different: http://www.cforcoding.com/2009/06/hysteria-over-url-shortening.html
William Shields on June 16, 2009 6:56 AMTwitter shortens my urls even if there is no need to shorten them. I would prefer to have my real url shown for branding purposes.
Steve on June 16, 2009 7:10 AMJeff,
actually the twitter sayd that you joined not in 2006 but on 29th April 2007 :)
(http://doiop.com/ )[http://doiop.com/ ]
who would have thought the old alt+255 trick works with url shorteners? ^^
schnalle on June 16, 2009 7:14 AMI'm not sick of the mainstream news coverage because I don't watch TV. When you watch TV, the corporations win.
Robert S. Robbins on June 16, 2009 7:16 AMApart from the SMS features of Twitter (which should be obsolete as soon as SMS becomes obsole due to push e-mail and... strangely enough Twitter itself) the technical data limit of Twitter should not be a reason to shorten urls.
Also, Twitter should be the one doing the shortening. If Twitter goes, so do the urls. Now, if shortening service X goes down, many Tweets becme broken (are old Tweets even worth saving/seeing).
Now the Twitter API should evolve. I think that #hashtag, @at and urls should be handled separately from the main message.
If I want to say something about Iran to somebody and provide a link, I could already be limited to ~110 characters. Now I generally have nothing interesting to say, but below 100 characters it will become even more difficult.
So, here's the new Twitter interface:
----------
I posted a great idea in the comments to your latest [blog post:1], I'd tell you more, but it doesn't fit in the tweet!
----------
@codinghorror
#urlshortening
#twitterapi
1:http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001276.html
well, maybe this URL un-shortening web service will come in handy to someone: http://therealurl.appspot.com/ (with JSON! and JSONP! ;))
Nir on June 16, 2009 7:22 AM@Angus: the rev=canonical has also its controversies [1]. It seems to be right on track side by side with Reply-To munging :-)...
It seems to have been removed from HTML5 [2]
[1] http://benramsey.com/archives/a-revcanonical-rebuttal/
[2] http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2006-July/006888.html
Has anybody tried making two posts on twitter? Or is that bad form?
Practicality on June 16, 2009 7:27 AMI agree.
Also, while I agree that there is a big benefit to having twitter limit to 140 characters there's a case that they would have been better off excluding URLs from the count. They are collecting immense amounts of links that people consider hot yet, Twitter has to do a lot of processing to get actual URLs.
Sam Farmer on June 16, 2009 7:28 AMTwitter? What he heck is Twitter? ;)
Matt on June 16, 2009 7:29 AMTwitter's premise is that the text should work as an SMS. "Hidden" links do not translate to SMS and thus Twitter would argue that it couldn't use those without in some cases truncating text through SMS.
We actually allow you to buy your own tiny URL service so you don't have to worry about the domain going away, and track our own stats, etc:
Matthew on June 16, 2009 7:32 AMI agree with Steve a few comments back about branding your link. I hate the shortening when Twitter doesn't need to shorten the url. Unfortunately my url is a tad on the long side and eats up alot of the 140 characters anyways.
self defense Rob on June 16, 2009 7:32 AMTwitter caused the problem, so Twitter should solve it: URLs will count only for X characters, no matter how long they actually are. They will be displayed in full, except:
Any URLs that need to be sent via SMS will be shortened by Twitter immediately before sending. (Most people don't surf from plain old cell phones anyway. People with smart phones are mainly using Web interface of special client.)
Ryan Tate on June 16, 2009 7:40 AMI think I saw mention today of a URL shortening service being hacked. So it could be sending people to malware sites. I'm generally wary of clicking on shortened URLS, especially if from people I don't know.
I try to tweet/dent original URLS if they will fit, although I have to trick Gwibber (Linux client) by missing off the first character to prevent automatic shortening.
As for the issue of linking breaking if the service dies, maybe site developers could start generating their own short URLs as http://site.com/###### and provide that for people to use on Twitter if they want to future-proof inward-bound links.
Steve on June 16, 2009 7:40 AM140 characters isn't feature. It's SMS problem :)))
fbuser.com on June 16, 2009 7:43 AMI agree with Steve. Web sites should provide their own shortened links instead of those God awful long ones.
Matt on June 16, 2009 7:55 AMGet off my lawn!
Chris on June 16, 2009 8:08 AMI completely agree. If tinyurl.com goes away, most of twitter has no meaning. Most tweets are "Hey, check this out: http://tinyurl.com/????". The meaning is in the link, not in the tweet. If those url-shorteners go away, we're all kind of SOL.
Steve Webb on June 16, 2009 8:17 AM"I completely agree. If tinyurl.com goes away, most of twitter has no meaning. Most tweets are "Hey, check this out: http://tinyurl.com/????". The meaning is in the link, not in the tweet. If those url-shorteners go away, we're all kind of SOL."
I'm not convinced. Twitter's whole principle is "throwaway thoughts". Should we really consider the links a vital resource for the future?
The problem started with websites that use rediculously large URLs to begin with:
If I want to simply link to amazon's Code Complete book here is the URL that I need:
So, URL shortening (and all it's led to) is simply an industry response to websites using complex URLs.
rel on June 16, 2009 8:21 AMMost good Twitter clients (I use TwitterFox) will not only perform the magic of automatic URL shortening, but when you hover over a shortened link will perform the magic of URL longening.
Is tinyurl.com/ks6h38 really any less readable than codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001276.html?
Unless we force full semantic web, these services usefulness will outweigh their shortcomings and people will develop nicely integrated reverse lookups to span the shortcomings.
Matt Nowack on June 16, 2009 8:22 AMActually, this is history.
The web has been leveraged far beyond what one would have expected. Along comes a rather silly app (you know it is when it is referenced on the news daily and even your grandmother uses it) with a limitation -- which causes a major transformation. By accident.
I think that the 140 character limit will go down in history as one of the top 5 decisions that shaped the world wide web.
Steve on June 16, 2009 8:23 AMIf Twitter standardised on one URL shortening service, and did it all automatically, they could send out shortened URLs only to SMS users. That's the only case where shortened URLs are at all useful.
Readers on the web and those who read through desktop and mobile applications would get the full version of the URL, perhaps truncated for display. http://rossshannon.com/2009/04/17/twitter-and-urls/
Ross Shannon on June 16, 2009 8:23 AM@Matt Nowack
"I tinyurl.com/ks6h38 really any less readable than codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001276.html?"
Yes it is as you don't know where in the world will you end up by clicking tinyurl.com/xxxxxx
The domain name is hidden. Hurray for phishing I guess.
Janis Veinbergs on June 16, 2009 8:47 AMrel, it's possible to use ISBN-10 in Amazon URLs, but it's not easy to figure out.
http://amazon.com/s?field-isbn=0735619670
It's still too long.
Zack Peterson on June 16, 2009 8:48 AMI'm not a twit, so I don't use Twitter. End of problem, as far as I'm concerned.
Carl Smotricz on June 16, 2009 8:49 AMI don't use Twitter -- not against it, just apathetic to it.
That said, I think the primary reason that it has taken off in usage is because it is taking advantage of the fact that the largest percentage of "computer" users in the world are in fact, cell phone users where the cell phone is their primary computer and communication tool.
Timothy Lee Russell on June 16, 2009 8:49 AMRoss Shannon has got the right idea.
Zack Peterson on June 16, 2009 8:50 AMsearch for "Don't get me wrong" site:codinghorror.com yields 147 hits. Time to retire that phrase!
Mark Nelson on June 16, 2009 8:56 AMits worrying but seen as twitter will be dead by this time next year and twitter is the only reason short urls are remotely popular then who cares
fdsfdsfds on June 16, 2009 9:00 AMI do agree. However, what about the websites that create the horrifically long, non human readable URLs in the first place. They could be destroying the web just as much.
Lucas Rockwell on June 16, 2009 9:02 AMEvery website on the internet should offer a shortening service for every URL on the site. For instance, this post could be: codinghorror.com/001276.
Lucas Rockwell on June 16, 2009 9:05 AMI detest shortened URLs because I want to know where I am going.
Security issues are one reason, but there are others --
If I'm at work, I don't want to go to youtube or any video site.
I don't want to follow a link to something I've already read, or a site that is already on my daily reading list.
I don't want to follow a link to any kind of binary file, even PDFs, without knowing it ahead of time, because I like to know what my system is going to do when I click a link.
And there are some sites that I just find annoying, and I don't want to go to them.
I cannot know any of these things with a short URL.
Dave A. on June 16, 2009 9:44 AMConfirming that URL shorteners are evil.
Austin on June 16, 2009 9:51 AMThe 140 char limit is because of the same limit in SMS (So a Tweet can be sent to/from a mobile phone)
It is this that is the problem....
Try asking a Japanese web user when they last typed in a URL ... the answer is likely to be never.. they always search for it
Short URL services are loved by journalists, so they can publish URL's in magazines (pointless anyway) and on twitter... get a blog and use your mobile for making calls and reading blogs ....
Jaster on June 16, 2009 9:57 AMIndeed! I wrote a URL shortener for my own ASP.net site for exactly those reasons:
Matt Sherman on June 16, 2009 10:19 AMI poopted in my pantses.
Ibod Catooga on June 16, 2009 10:33 AMAlsoi, I did your mom an hour ago.
Ibod Catooga on June 16, 2009 10:36 AMand then there's http://www.longurlplease.com/ and http://www.hugeurl.com/ of course.
/mp
Mauricio Pastrana on June 16, 2009 10:48 AMI think sites could re-construct a shortening services links using their referer url's is they have any sort of good analytics :-)
imma on June 16, 2009 11:45 AM"and then there's http://www.longurlplease.com/ and http://www.hugeurl.com/ of course."
Those are feekin' awesome.
Andrew Stobbe on June 16, 2009 11:55 AMI like that Atlassian Confluence generates short urls. Since the application itself generates the urls they are never wrong. Even if you relocate a page within the wiki, the short url will still point at the correct page.
Mike Miller on June 16, 2009 12:17 PM"as a software developer, you'll be fortunate to build one project that achieves critical [...] I don't think I will."
Yeah, real shame that stackoverflow never caught on.
Ben on June 16, 2009 12:20 PMI prefer http://freakinghugeurl.com/
max on June 16, 2009 12:24 PMI almost never click on any link that isn't to something I can see where I'm going. So shortened URLs are a good way to get me to ignore whatever it was you wanted me to see. :)
Similarly when programmers use services like "pastie" to put a code sample up and then post a question to a mailing list linking back to the pastie URL, I generally ignore those questions.
Michael on June 16, 2009 12:34 PMWhat no comments about http://www.socuteurl.com/
Coding Horror becomes http://www.socuteurl.com/berrybuggy
stack overflow: http://www.socuteurl.com/bunnyslippers
The best usage for URL shorteners is Rickrolling. Especially the ones that let you specify the text of the link.
Nathan on June 16, 2009 12:57 PMI always thought Google should start their own... they should buy http://ggl.it
Brandon on June 16, 2009 1:10 PMMy reCaptcha was "irom tapping"... so of course I tried "penis tapping" and it worked :)
I love reCaptcha.
Brandon on June 16, 2009 1:12 PMI have hated URL shortners from day one. I never click on a single one no matter the circumstances. Also, i HATE twitter.
Petey B on June 16, 2009 1:17 PMDoesn't anyone else think all the twittermania is a carefully engineered marketing plan? I mean come on, what does twitter do for a celebrity that a regular blog doesn't? I'm sure there's some money exchanging hands here.
Bill on June 16, 2009 2:14 PMThe problem isn’t with Twitter or the URL shortening services. The problem is that you’re using the wrong tool for the job. Twitter is generally not a good platform for...
"brief summary or opinion" [link for more detail]
Less that 4% of my tweets have required the use of tinyurl. Because I don’t try to use Twitter for something Twitter isn’t good for. Few of my tweets include links at all and the vast majority of those are twitpic.
Twitter could certainly become a better platform for such things, but—so far—they don’t want to. It seems a bit counter to their intentions to me. Try adjusting your use to better match what it is (as the whole 140 character limit suggests), and see if you don’t enjoy it more.
Generally, I do think URL shortening services have a lot of problems, which is why I avoid using them except in the rarest circumstances. Again—using it in a way that works makes me happier than complaining that abusing it doesn’t work well.
Robert Fisher on June 16, 2009 2:50 PMhashing urls for shortening doesn't really make sense because we want a function that takes a small input and produces a larger one not a function that takes a large input and produces a smaller one.
drscroogemcduck on June 16, 2009 3:02 PMHuh? WTF Are you talking about? Is it just me or are you talking about something that is completely meaningless and has absolutely no impact whatsoever? Whats twitter? Whats a tiny url? Why do we need tiny urls? I use the internet alot, everyday, alot. and I have NO idea what youre blathering on about. Sorry, i tried.
Bitter on June 16, 2009 3:43 PMPersonnally, I find shrinkster and tinyurl way to long. Is there anything shorter than tr.im?
T(r)im on June 16, 2009 4:17 PMI can't wait until the uselessness that is Twitter goes the way of Geocities.
Steve on June 16, 2009 4:23 PMWhy not use the approach you suggested just a few days ago? Ignore twitter. Ignore URL shorteners. You only give them power by using them.
I don't twitter, I don't use URL shorteners ... I have never felt better in my life! :)
Eugene on June 16, 2009 4:35 PMGreat post .. good discussion .. however has the idea of "web standards" been forgotten? I think the biggest issue raised here was the subversive effect url shorteners have on the web. However, as some said they are the public response to a real problem. As usual, the standards organisations and the big men in town are way behind the pack.
It's just a gold rush and the shortener services are mining the free claims while they can. No need to panic, but definitely interesting sport.
Aidan de Graaf on June 16, 2009 4:48 PM>Most of us never get there. I don't think I will.
Aww, Jeffy, SO's awesome. it's just a far narrower subset of web users using it.
One weird think I've noticed twitter do was if I put a longish URL in my tweet, even if the whole tweet is less than 140 characters it still converts it to a bit.ly URL.
What's up with that?
Evan on June 16, 2009 6:11 PMFYI, the 140-character limit is enforced by Twitter's web interface, but not its underlying mechanism. I recently added Twitter support to some applications I produce, and was surprised to find the API let me publish tweats 300+ characters long, and they fully appeared to those following the target account.
I suspect that this support is accidental, and, hence, temporary.
Jeffrey Friedl on June 16, 2009 8:06 PMI don't give a rat's about shortened URLs or Twitter.
They are both irrelevant. Please focus on things that actually matter.
No matter how you look at it shortened URLs aren't hurting anyone. It's not "evil" like crime, it's not even "bad" like natural disasters. No - it's an annoyance of yours, just like twitter is an annoyance of mine.
Philip on June 16, 2009 8:26 PM>"Every tiny URL is another baby step towards destroying the web as we know it."
I'm sorry, I'll just stop taking you seriously there.
Garrett on June 16, 2009 8:30 PMSomehow I doubt that the downfall of the Internet will be TinyURL and Twitter.
URL shortners are not meant for linking in blogs and web pages. They're meant to be temporary links from email, IM and things like Twitter.
I'm not sure how jump from "temporary URL" to "Walled Garden" but it is defiantly a stretch.
-CF
ChronoFish on June 16, 2009 8:54 PMSafe.mn (http://safe.mn/) makes a daily dump off all sort links available to anybody: ftp://safe.mn/ Data are under CC license, anybody can mirror the data.
Julien on June 16, 2009 9:15 PMYeah, I'm completely sick of Twitter. I'm sick of hearing how Twitter has replaced or will replace all other forms of textual communication including forms, private instant messaging (because, of course, we want everything to be public), and the like. I'm pretty weirded out when I see news anchors on CNN (substitue your preferred network) with a straight face reading inane tweets and actually saying the crazy handles of the twitterers with a straight face.
Also, yeah, I noticed your "patented" formula. I'm actually please to see you talk about Twitter madness like this. It's the first good post in months. :)
However, your Twitter messages are inane. Those 4-word incomprehensible summaries followed always by a YouTube link are very odd. Ironically, I agree, the URL shorteners is why I don't even bother click on any links in Twitter anymore unless the description is very, very explicit. I know this will invite the inevitable "but you can conigufe the URL shortener to preview the URL," however, I just can't be bothered.
Charles on June 16, 2009 10:23 PMI wonder how this affects SEO.
Anyway, that is why we have services such as http://www.untiny.com/
I still think twitter is hype, the very definition of self-regard. Who cares what you think? Plus it's blocked at my office.
Andrew on June 16, 2009 11:53 PMtest
Jeff Atwood on June 17, 2009 12:56 AMCoincidentally, the URL shortener Cligs was hacked and 2.2 million URLs were changed. This time it was a harmless link. Next time it could be a link to a malicious site that infects your systems.
http://blog.cli.gs/news/hack-update
Secure on June 17, 2009 1:19 AM"I still think twitter is hype, the very definition of self-regard. Who cares what you think?"
There's something about this statement that's oddly retarded... oh yes. YOU'RE COMMENTING ON THE INTERNET ABOUT HOW PEOPLE SHOULDN'T COMMENT ON THE INTERNET!
What seperates Twitter from Blog Comments, other than the fact that people have to actively select you as interesting on Twitter, whereas Blog Comments merely require them to be interested in the blog you're commenting on?
People commenting against Twitter, recursing hypocrisy since 2008.
You see how annoyed I am? I even misspelled "separate".
Tom Clarke on June 17, 2009 1:37 AM"The web has been leveraged far beyond what one would have expected. Along comes a rather silly app (you know it is when it is referenced on the news daily and even your grandmother uses it)"
Erm, isn't that Google?
Dear lord, it's like listening a bunch of grandfathers complaining about the days when there were none of these "dang short trousers and long-haired men".
Tom Clarke on June 17, 2009 1:41 AMI FULLY agree regarding the strange media hype. There seems to be a mysterious PR agency that it is capable to do that. Also, any blurb out of the press department by Apple, Microsoft, Google and SecondLife (in the past) is recycled in ANY possible manner daily. That is actually one of the reasons why I am tired of many "news" sources. News are not news if they are not new. *sigh*
Meri Kron on June 17, 2009 1:48 AMFirst, Twitter is designed to be be about *the now* - what *are* you doing? What *are* you thinking? What *is* happening around you? As a result, the fact that it may not be optimal when referring to past tweets is largely irrelevant (except, of course, it's being used for much more than originally intended).
Second, the thing that's killing Twitter isn't the fact that URLs are being shortened left, right and centre; it's the fact that loads of people are just spamming out links of stuff they just saw and thought "that's cool - EVERYONE should now about this video of a cat falling off a sofa/SteveY's latest epic", often tweeted without commentary (because, face it, how much commentary can you put in 140 chars?) If people stopped just tweeting EVERY "cool" link they came across, the utility of Twitter would be vastly improved.
And you know where this is going: my worst culprit for this behaviour? Jeff Atwood, j'accuse! :-) [actually, you've been a lot better recently. Have you been too busy to surf?]
Rob Gilliam on June 17, 2009 2:31 AMYeah, I'm completely sick of Twitter. I'm sick of hearing how Twitter has replaced or will replace all other forms of textual communication including forms, private instant messaging (because, of course, we want everything to be public), and the like. I'm pretty weirded out when I see news anchors on CNN (substitue your preferred network) with a straight face reading inane tweets and actually saying the crazy handles of the twitterers with a straight face.
Also, yeah, I noticed your "patented" formula. I'm actually please to see you talk about Twitter madness like this. It's the first good post in months. :)
However, your Twitter messages are inane. Those 4-word incomprehensible summaries followed always by a YouTube link are very odd. Ironically, I agree, the URL shorteners is why I don't even bother click on any links in Twitter anymore unless the description is very, very explicit. I know this will invite the inevitable "but you can conigufe the URL shortener to preview the URL," however, I just can't be bothered.
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Yeah, I'm completely sick of Twitter. I'm sick of hearing how Twitter has replaced or will replace all other forms of textual communication including forms, private instant messaging (because, of course, we want everything to be public), and the like. I'm pretty weirded out when I see news anchors on CNN (substitue your preferred network) with a straight face reading inane tweets and actually saying the crazy handles of the twitterers with a straight face.
Also, yeah, I noticed your "patented" formula. I'm actually please to see you talk about Twitter madness like this. It's the first good post in months. :)
However, your Twitter messages are inane. Those 4-word incomprehensible summaries followed always by a YouTube link are very odd. Ironically, I agree, the URL shorteners is why I don't even bother click on any links in Twitter anymore unless the description is very, very explicit. I know this will invite the inevitable "but you can conigufe the URL shortener to preview the URL," however, I just can't be bothered.
http://www.askthecoders.com
http://www.askthecoders.com/forum
http://www.friendfeed.com: no 140 chars limit, -> no shorteners, or any @# metadata in my content!
Plus, if you follow twitters on FF, they'll unshorten the links, so you'll haver a better idea what you're clicking on.
But really, check out FriendFeed.
Great post ! Couldn't agree more.
Manu on June 17, 2009 4:20 AMWow, someone woke up on the wrong side of something this morning.
Someone You Know on June 17, 2009 5:00 AMFULL ACK!
You might like longurlplease.com, it is similar to other firefox addons presented here...
"Am I really getting all the news" No. You are not getting ALL of the news here in the USA. You are getting a severely polished up version of what the liberal media THINKS is the news. As far as Twitter goes? Its a waste of my time. I dont have time to tell the world that I am eating "everything" bagels with espresso in my PJs as I wait for a VS 2008 build to complete. No need for *anyone* to know this level of information AND when people begin to figure out just how intrusive all this "social" crap really is and what an invasion of privacy that it really is -- they'll stop.
Mike on June 17, 2009 5:46 AMLooks like security issues are very pertininet.
http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2009/06/cligs.html?_log_from=rss
I don't understand your problem with the URL shorteners. I think you are exaggerating one website's role. It's not that everyone on the planet uses said Twitter, I don't even know what it is. If you believe their URL handling is bad, why don't you complain to them?
Azarien on June 17, 2009 6:48 AM@Robert S. Robbins "I'm not sick of the mainstream news coverage because I don't watch TV. When you watch TV, the corporations win."
NPR went over the edge some months ago with a coordinated "twitter" use/PR campaign for all of their hosts and programs. It is quite annoying for those of us who don't use IM and their ilk.
Bob on June 17, 2009 6:57 AMI'm not sure there's a universal answer, beyond something like rev=canonical where the control is in the publishers hands, not the users, so it has it's own problems. However, there is a fairly simple solution for Twitter.
First, Twitter should provide it's own URL shortening service. How about http://tw.it to be cute. This service should provide APIs for reversing the short URL. Nothing new here, most of the shortening services do all of this, but Twitter needs to own "the" service used by all tweets in order to control user experience.
Next, Twitter should translate all other shortened URLs to use a Twitter shortened URL. Unknown shorteners obviously will "sneak by" this conversion, but if the shortener isn't known, it's not likely that someone's going to click through using that URL when all other shorteners have been scrubbed. For known shorteners that don't provide a mechanism for unshortening, they should be translated to a shortened URL to a page warning of the potential problems related to following through to the link.
Now, we have one official shortener that's used in basically every tweet. Twitter clients can now take advantage of this. No more choosing what shortener to use when sending, and when receiving the URL should always be unshortened for display. True SMS clients won't be able to do any of this, of course, but little utility is lost by this fact.
wekempf on June 17, 2009 7:15 AM@Robert Fisher, Rob Gilliam:
If people are using twitter in a way that you do not find useful that's your problem. You can always simply not follow them on twitter. Or if you think trending topics tell you anything about humanity you should check this months most popular search terms at google and weep.
@Anonymous:
Well said. :-)
Jeff is such a tool. He's just concerned that shortened urls to his site won't be included in his PageRank at Google.
Todd on June 17, 2009 10:08 AM@Mike,
I think you just told us.
I wish you hadn't. It's kind of a scary picture.
;)
Practicality on June 17, 2009 10:11 AMBy the way. Twitter doesn't care what you think.
Neither does Google.
That's one of the benefits of being big. Enough people use you that you no longer have to please the loud users, just the majority.
Practicality on June 17, 2009 10:13 AMSo is it bad when I do this? https://twitter.com/SonoranCellist/status/2163487721
SonoranCellist on June 17, 2009 10:21 AMLast night i was a victim of shortened URL. Tinyurl must set preview link feature as a default one.
Couldn't agree with Dave A more.
A victim on June 17, 2009 11:21 AMI use URL shortening services on crazy long URL's when I know whomever I'm sending it to is going to have a tough time actually getting it to work. It works well for that, otherwise I agree.
gs on June 17, 2009 1:12 PMWell, i see it more as a service, people see it as a service to extend business and news media sees it as a TRP boosting interest factor..
chinmoy on June 17, 2009 5:04 PMThere are way too many people who think that anyone else gives a crap about what they had for breakfast, but they can't all be on TV.
seanb on June 17, 2009 6:53 PM2 Million Cligs Short URLS Cracked
http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2009/06/2-million-cligs-short-urls-hac.html
Zoasterboy on June 17, 2009 7:13 PMIt makes me happy that I have only a vague and peripheral idea what Twitter is, and don't care enough to STFW and find out more.
Michael on June 17, 2009 7:48 PM@AskTheCoders
Why the hell are you stealing my comments and spamming them on here?
No one cares about your dumb web site.
Charles on June 17, 2009 8:57 PMThe cli.gs debacle proves one thing: Twitter should have its own URL shortening service.
Ideally, it should even be transparent to the Twitter user.
Bart on June 17, 2009 9:50 PM@wds
Appreciate fully that I can just unfollow Jeff. Thing is sometimes (often) he tweets interesting stuff about HIS life, HIS site, HIS opinions that I'd prefer not to miss. So I'll politely(-ish, but please note the smiley) point out that the "link noise" makes his Twitter feed less valuable to me. Will he care? Should he care? I doubt it very much.
Not sure where the "trending topics" thing comes from, but personally I think it only tells you that "society" moves quickly from being interested in one thing to being interested in something else.
Rob Gilliam on June 18, 2009 1:43 AMtry this one, and see where it leads to :D
http://tinyurl.com/suckverymuch
I agree. Destroying the web may be an overstatement (aka hype to get us on this blog) but shorteners are a big problem. If you are a domain owner you lose the branding of your links. As a user, it should annoy the crap out of you (as it does me) if you don't know what you are clicking on. It's even worse when Twitter auto-shortens links... they are in bed with these shortners if you haven't realized.
yep on June 18, 2009 11:16 AMThis seems to have been noted here already but Twitter = Annoying. I'm sure that I don't care what anyone person is doing at any moment (no offense Jeff), and I'm sure that if anyone of any importance in my life wants to contact me they can use the good old fashioned phone, or the technologies that may not be deemed as cool as twitter anymore which include normal IM and text messaging. I didn't get a freaking BB to have a QWERTY keyboard for nothing dangit!!! But seriously.. if I'm watching the news why the hell would I go jump on my pc to look at that news channels "tweets". And if I'm at dinner, I'm enjoying dinner with the family, maybe some friends and having a drink and I don't give a crap to check out twitter to see what the progress of Hanselman's homemade arcade is at any given time. Geez people step away from your pc's for like 2 seconds to enjoy other things in life.
Tim on June 19, 2009 1:22 PMI'm the same. I don't see the hype that's involved around Twitter. I mostly think that people join it because it's being heavily advertised but after a week they stop using it and retreat back to Facebook.
david on June 21, 2009 10:10 AMEveryone ignores another real useful use of shortened URLs: telling someone a URL over a non-web medium - phone or podcast or written. I know that Hanselman used to have the short URLs on his podcast which worked really well. This use is great, as is the other way I've used shortening services recently - to send a URL via post-it note. Hit a URL shortener and suddenly you only have to write down 10-15 characters and it is much easier to fit on the note.
There seems to be one thing which is missing from these URL shorteners that everyone is complaining about, and that is persistence. If the URL shorteners would publish their data to the web through a periodic torrent every once in a while like the StackOverflow data feed, then people could archive the short URL => Long URL mapping and recreate a service if it dies later, lengthening URLs long after the service has turned to dust. You could brute-force the mapping yourself actually if you just know the character set which they use for shortening, but that is not nice. I believe that providing a torrent every say, week or so should balance timeliness. If the torrent was constructed carefully (with similar file structure and updates), you could even just download the new data in each week. Using BitTorrent also lowers the bandwidth needed by the shortener by a large factor.
@wds
I’m not complaining about how Jeff uses Twitter. I don’t follow him, and based on this post I’m unlikely to start.
I’m just suggesting that if he was using the right tool for the right job, he wouldn’t have written this post complaining that the tools aren’t working for him.
Anonymous on June 26, 2009 12:25 PM
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Oyunlar on July 8, 2009 11:12 PMTwitter is a fad and will eventually fizzel out. I also don't get why people are so hung up about Twitter. In fact I stopped using it because I think it's just retarded.
If you really want to see a marketing opportunity for your company at least, Facebook to me is still a key to any business trying to drive more traffic. Now there is a site to STILL be focusing on and trying to utilize more for your target markets.
This Twitter is overrated. And most people just use it to brag. Boooring. Big deal, it's text posting. Again, that's its limits. I don't see what the uproar is about. It's time to move past this Twitter Phenomenon and focus on real sites that give you a lot more interesting options to market to potential new customers.
Are we so sad that all we have to talk about is Twitter? Man, life must be pretty lame for you if that's the case.
I use to hate Facebook (vowed never to use it because I thought it was just stupid) but now I'm stuck on the damn thing. Am I stuck on Twitter...hell no. It gets old quickly. Facebook does not.
Dave Schinkel on July 9, 2009 8:40 AMoh thanks
oyunlar on July 10, 2009 2:20 PMJeff - super great post. Thanks for this.
Jayasankar on July 15, 2009 1:31 AM"The web has been leveraged far beyond what one would have expected. Along comes a rather silly app (you know it is when it is referenced on the news daily and even your grandmother uses it)"
jeff on July 16, 2009 12:29 AMI see both sides. On one hand you see these so-called SEO experts touting "keywords is everything" which leads to people creating keyword-rich URLs that are in excess of 100 characters long that drive us nuts. They should be punished. The rest of us however, who have reasonably lengthed URLs (20 characters or less), should not have to use a shortform...we already are shortform.
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Lingerie on August 26, 2009 6:02 PMURL shorteners are an unnecessary quirk of Twitter's interface that are not good for the web.
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ask sözleri on September 9, 2009 4:49 PMFYI, the 140-character limit is enforced by Twitter's web interface, but not its underlying mechanism. I recently added Twitter support to some applications I produce, and was surprised to find the API let me publish tweats 300+ characters long, and they fully appeared to those following the target account.
I suspect that this support is accidental, and, hence, temporary.
Barbie dress up on September 14, 2009 2:20 PMI agree.
Also, while I agree that there is a big benefit to having twitter limit to 140 characters there's a case that they would have been better off excluding URLs from the count.
They are collecting immense amounts of links that people consider hot yet, Twitter has to do a lot of processing to get actual URLs.
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dizi izle on September 18, 2009 8:45 AMYeah, I noticed your "patented" formula. I'm actually please to see you talk about Twitter madness like this.
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