Mon 14 Dec 2009
As much as I hate to bump Miss Scarlett from the top of the page, I’ve got a rant to spit out in lieu of doing real work.
Google has just added a URL shortener service (and provided shortcuts to it from their Toolbar and other products) named goo.gl and it will “compete” with services such at bit.ly and others. Â The reason for these URL shorteners is that some things give you very few characters to send URLs and the long URLs (especially those auto generated by content management systems) don’t leave much room for anything else. And by “some things” I mean Twitter and SMS messages. And since URLs in SMS are a LOT more rare than in tweets, it basically comes down to the fact that Twitter is too short to support real world URLs so you have to use these services to post links via their service. Â 140 characters on Twitter wasn’t enough for these massive URLs, so we had a problem, and now we have URL shortening services.
Problem solved.
Fuck that. Â This isn’t a problem that was solved, it’s a problem that was manufactured, and then compounded. Â Where does this bit.ly link go? It could go to goatse, and you wouldn’t know until after you clicked it. Â Decades of progress on the WWW thrown away because Twitter made ADHD popular. Â Well, at least the short URL leaves people room to give context in their tweets or SMS messages. Â Except that these same people are short-attention-span having mofos who post all their links by saying “click here.”
Let’s look at this problem from the beginning:
- When did it start: when Twitter got popular
- What websites commonly are afflicted by this problem: twitter.com
- What websites is this fix actually useful for: twitter.com
So here’s my suggestion:
Twitter, clean up your own mess and provide metadata fields on tweets: exactly one URL field per tweet that does not count against the (wholly arbitrary) 140 character limit will do.
Assuming they were to listen to me, this costs them a little more bandwidth, limits tweets to 1 URL per message (which is a good thing) and avoids all the problems associated with URL shorteners (which includes linkjacking in addition to the anonymous destination problem).
“But,” you whine. “That’ll make it harder to submit URLs through twitter!”
No, you twit, it will not. Â Just put your URL anywhere in the tweet and Twitter can use magical text processing to automatically move the URL to the metadata field. No URL shorteners, full 140 characters available, no muss, no fuss.
That, mother fuckers, is how you solve problems: I tell you who to blame.
I’m with you on the hate for these URL shorteners – and while your suggestion has some merit, the problem is, Twitter has that limit because they let you receive tweets as SMS messages, so adding metadata or making them longer would break this aspect of their service.
But yeah, i pretty much never click any links from URL shorteners on principle. I’m looking forward to when twitter and facebook are no longer front and center on the web.