Comments on: URL shortening it’s nasty but it’s also unnecessary

By: yungchin

yungchin — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 09:49:47 +0000

Twitter may well store the message as 205 characters – it’s not as if that would eat too much disk space. The only hard restriction comes in when they send it as a SMS text message.

It would have been just as sensible for text-message recipients not to see the link at all (maybe just [] brackets around the link-word). They have to log on to a modern-day device to follow the link anyway, so they might as well visit Twitter when they do that…

By: Michael Smethurst

Michael Smethurst — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 21:26:15 +0000

Just to correct myself. When a tweet contains the shortened URL the source is actually:
shorturl

So if the message body is 140 characters long the message source is 140 + 46 characters of additional markup + the length of the short URL in the @href.

The source of this tweet for example is 205 characters.

I’m guessing twitter do the URL shortening (where they feel necessary) on tweet ingest and don’t store the original message / URL. Then when they display the tweet they add the link element.

Obviously it would add huge overheads if they shortened URLs on publishing but there’s no reason (other than data storage) why they couldn’t additionally store the tweet as:
shorturl
or even
link
and use that version for the web and the shorturl version for elsewhere.

Having said that there’s always some reason why people do things that’s impossible for an outsider to see so difficult to second guess their decisions!

@frankie twitter only shorten where they feel necessary. Not really possible to work out the rules for this without spamming twitter with test messages. I think the point is it’s never necessary. Even if they have to use a shortener to shorten the visible message they don’t have to shorten the link @href on the web.

@Julien as open as possible – in this case totally :-)
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC0
it gets timbl’s backing
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lod/2009Jun/0091.html

By: Tom Scott

Tom Scott — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 21:12:41 +0000

@Julien basically you need to allow derivative works for data.

By: Julien

Julien — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 23:27:44 +0000

Tom, that is a good point. Which version of the CC would you prefer? I can certainly change it to a less restritictve version.

By: Tom Scott

Tom Scott — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:30:11 +0000

That certainly helps – especially when combined with the rev=”canonical” solution as proposed by Kellan and implemented by Simon Willison: http://simonwillison.net/2009/Apr/11/revcanonical/

By: Tom Scott

Tom Scott — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:26:32 +0000

That’s true and that would help, but it wouldn’t fix the resultant broken links if the link shortner went bust, recycled the link or decided to censor the site.

By: Tom Scott

Tom Scott — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:23:38 +0000

Julien, that’s good news that you are making the data available, but looking at your site I see that you are licensing the underlying data under a CC-no derivative works license which, when it comes to data, is seriously limiting. Put it this way, it would prevent anyone else from using your data to create a similar service should safe.mn decide to close the service, if you went bust etc. And that’s important because it goes to the very heart of the problem – shortening services make the web more brittle because they risk resulting in broken links.

By: Julien Sobrier

Julien Sobrier — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 04:04:40 +0000

“[...]in addition to the source code being open sourced[...]” Safe.mn addresses the two main criticisms to URL shorteners: security and transparency. All links are thoroughly verified for viruses, malware, phishing, malicious content, session stealing, cross-site scripting attacks, etc. Any suspicious link gets flagged, and users are warned about it. Safe.mn is also the most transparent URL shortener service: all links generated by Safe.mn are publicly available, and updated regularly.

The code is not outsourced, but the list of all shortened URLs is available to anybody.

By: Frankie Roberto

Frankie Roberto — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 10:09:47 +0000

Twitter have already started doing exactly this. eg see my tweet: http://twitter.com/frankieroberto/status/2040670517 – they’ve truncated the visible url to 30 characters (including “…” at the end).

Unfortunately, they haven’t factored this truncation into the 140 character limit yet. But it’s surely only a matter of time…

By: Duncan Robertson

Duncan Robertson — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 09:03:18 +0000

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/revcanonical/