@jamescridland – i disagree that twitter is transitory. the invention of the hashtag and incorporation of search has given old conversations new life. u can follow conference proceedings eg before, during and after. admittedly twitter’s suppression of older tweets means there’s still a limited active life but that active period seems to keep expanding as people find new ways to use the twitter platform

@tom it’s kind of a lie that twitter web messages are limited to 140 chars. if i write a tweet to the 140 limit that includes a link then <a href=”whatever”>whatever</a> will be added to the message. so whilst the visible part of the message is limited to 140 chars the message source isn’t. There’s no reason twitter couldn’t use the long url in the href whilst keeping the short url as the link text…
anyway, as u say there are 4 problems with url shortening:
(1) url obfuscation – i don’t know what i’ll get
(2) reliance on 3rd party – if they go out of business links break
(3) potential censorship by 3rd parties
(4) over aggressive url shorteners reusing ids
Having just come across longurl.org i think it could solve at least some of these problems. It provides a service to expand short urls from many, many providers into long urls. With a firefox extension they already solve (1).
The cool bit is it caches the expansion so has a persistent store of short <> long mappings. They plan to expose these mappings on the web which would also solve (2).
This is cool cos most shortening services don’t allow u to check if a short exists for a given long without the side effect of creating a short if it doesn’t already exist….
There’s not much we can do about (3). if longurl catches a short pre- censored it’ll cache the mapping but if it’s subsequently censored i’m not sure whether they’ll overwrite or keep the original mapping. Makes mappings time dependent which isn’t nice…
And (4) is just properly evil!!!!
IMHO longurl could be a web saviour. So download the firefox extension and use the jQuery plugin for derivadow.com. In an ideal world twitter would also use the jQuery plugin and we’d have a bigger, better store of mappings
Apologies for long comment. I would have wrote a blog post but i don’t have a blog. Guest post offers gratefully received ;-)

I think from Twitter’s perspective URL shortening makes sense on all platforms – unless they decide that they are going to drop the 140 character limit and/or drop it for the desktop version. Both of which would be odd. So I think it does make sense from a certain perspective.

Trouble is that it reinforces the use of URL shortening as an OK thing elsewhere – hence it’s anti pattern nature.

However, Twitter is pretty transitory. The use case here is “I want to send a URL, now, and I need it to be as short as possible”. I’m not convinced the use case is “I still need to have this working in the middle of next week”; so not convinced, wholly, that it’s a particular problem in Twitter.

(Good URL/ book choice btw)