Look, once upon a time, URL shorteners were pretty necessary. When it originated, it was intended to be used from your janky cellphones to send text messages. That’s where the 140 character limit comes from. SMS tended to break at 160 characters, so they left twenty for the originating username.
Virtually nobody uses text messages for twitter anymore, and the tiny remaining few aren’t going to follow a bit.ly link on their RAZR.
URL shorteners obfuscate links. Here’s how the internet works. Servers have IP addresses, but nobody wants to remember 216.34.181.45 instead of Slashdot, so we use DNS to resolve domain names into IPs. For the same reason, we try to use descriptive URLs (in Wordpress parlance, “pretty permalinks”) like http://example.com/url-shorteners-are-terrible rather than http://example.com/?p=2342 (although there are holdouts - Amazon, I’m looking at you).
URL shorteners crap on all of the work that we’ve done to make the internet more friendly to humans. Somebody built a server and got it an IP address. Then bought a unique domain name, using the massive infrastructure of DNS so you don’t have to know that IP. Then created a website and picked out a name for that particular page so you’d know what was on it. Then somebody used tr.im to squeeze it into twelve characters and all that work was wasted. You might as well be going to http://386.768.128.13/54813575816645745468 Only shorter.
When we shorten a URL, we do it for terrible reasons:
- Because you need to fit your tweet into the 140 character arbitrary limit.
- Because the original link was horrible to begin with.
- You’re trying to rickroll somebody. Okay, that one’s valid.
Look, Twitter is adding more and more metadata to tweets. You can follow a conversation thread. You can retweet and preserve the original now. You can see location data. Soon we’ll be able to add our own Annotations metadata for custom extensibility. All of those features are possible in every tweet, but none of them uses a single one of your 140 characters. URLs should be just like that. Metadata that doesn’t count toward the 140 character limit.
Why do we have to plop a URL into the body of a tweet in order to link? Why do you have to shorten URLs into anonymous garbled strings with no context? Why doesn’t a tweet looks and work like every other bit of text on the internet, where links are underlined normal words and you can hover or tap to see where they go?
How would writing a tweet work? I’m sure there are a dozen different ways. On my desktop, I’d lean toward Markdown, personally. For a mobile device, nearly every modern Twitter app will now detect a link and run it through a shortener for you. How about instead moving the link into metadata and replacing it with the word “link” - shorter than every shortener around - or prompting you for the desired anchor word. Then, instead of this:
I just wrote a Tumblr post on how Twitter could do in-line links better: http://bit.ly/dlZZQZ
we’d have tweets that look and function like this:
I just wrote a Tumblr post on how Twitter could do in-line links better.
Done this way, there’s no more need for URL shorteners. URLs work the same as they do everywhere else on the internet. It’s human- and machine-readable. It’s better for my mom and better for my analytics.
