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Twitter, Mind Your Business!
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Does anyone know why Twitter automatically shortens URLs?
It seems to me that if you’re within your 140 character limit, Twitter should mind its own business and leave what you wrote alone.
For example, I just typed http://billcammack.com/2009/04/10/time-part-06-whats-your-budget/ into
Example #1: http://twitter.com/BillCammack/status/1532756085
Example #2: http://twitter.com/BillCammack/status/1532757140
So since my statement would have fit within the 140 characters, how come I received a tinyurl?
Trust
The main reason I bring this up is that a lot of people won’t click on shortened links with very good reason. You don’t know what site you’re being directed to.
This isn’t just an issue on Twitter, but on forums, newsgroups, etc.
So what happens if I want people to know that I’m directing them to my own personal site, where they’ve already been 100 times and know what they’re likely to see?
In case you don’t know what a URL shortener does, it changes a link with a long string, such as http://billcammack.com/2009/04/10/time-part-06-whats-your-budget/ into something shorter, like http://tinyurl.com/blahbl so that it’s easier for people to remember, re-type or fit inside whatever character limit you have (such as Twitter’s 140 character limit).
So the problem is that lots of people & companies use shortened URLs to send you places where you don’t actually want to go. The more people get caught with this, the less they trust shortened URLs and then your links are automatically shortened by Twitter. :/
Another problem is that sometimes I link to my own site and sometimes I link to YouTube or to someone else’s site. I have to go out of my way to indicate that I’m sending people to my own site or take my chances that they think “ah… Another YouTube rock video. I’m not going to click on that link.”
Failure
Another problem is that in the case of the shortener company failing temporarily or permanently, those links no longer work, so then what?
Search
Another problem is that since the frenzy right now is trying to use Twitter for search, your site’s URL is being removed from every single post you make. That happens to make no difference to me, personally, because my Twitter name and my site name are the exact same thing. For people or companies that aren’t set up this way, it looks like they’ll be missing out on quite a few opportunities for search results.
Solutions?
Tyme White decided to make her own short URLs. Another way to get around the issue is to not use the long-format URL of your post, opting for something that looks like http://billcammack.com/?p=4667 (this post). If you know your actual post number, you should be able to fit it within the shortener cutoff, depending on the length of your actual site name.
This had been temporarily relieved a little while back, and I got to put some actual URLs in Twitter [link], but they closed it off again, apparently.
Anyway, if you know of some good reason why URLs should be shortened when they don’t need to be, feel free to enlighten me in the comments. I don’t really care about this, because people aren’t searching Twitter for my name.. They’re searching Google. For the people that DO care about being searched on Twitter, this may very well be a major issue that will affect them down the line, when there are zero mentions of their website and a million references to tinyurl.com available in search.twitter.com.
Edit: Jayson Flint ( jaysonflint.com / @jaysonflint ) left me a comment on Facebook that putting an asterisk * in front of the “http” solves this problem. *http://blahblah.
I just tried it and got the result I was looking for => http://twitter.com/BillCammack/status/1534164738.
The URL was still shortened in the text, but my site name was clearly visible/searchable, and the entire URL shows up in search => http://search.twitter.com/search?q=billcammack.com.
Thanks, Jayson. Cheers! :D
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4 Responses to “Twitter, Mind Your Business!”
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@twitter @EV not too psyched about twitter doing things we didn’t ask it to:http://billcammack.com/2009/04/16/twitter-mind-your-business/
It is frustrating but I think the logic is if @BillCammack is a trusted source then his links should be trusted. The problem is if I start seeing @BillCammack tweets like
” I am following a celibate life of my own choosing: http://tinyurl.com/dzdyx8 ”
I don’t know… are you just joking? Do I click the link or has a virus taken over your machine? My guess is with the number of bits that pass through Twitter even at 140 characters, saving bits saves $$.
Hey John :)
As far as point #1, even if I’m a trusted source, people trust me for different things. I might be making a post about dating or I might be making a post about social media or I might be making a post about working out or I might be linking to something a friend of mine did that I liked or I might be linking to something I saw on YouTube that I wanted to pass along… My “followers” don’t get to decide whether that TinyURL is going to my own site or to YouTube or DailyMotion or wherever. Because of this, if I want to be clear, I have to spend the extra characters putting “.. billcammack.com” behind the tinyurl link in order to specify.
On top of that, if my title explains my post, I have to waste the Twitter characters explaining my post. Therefore, automatically shortening URLs doesn’t necessarily save Twitter anything, although I agree with your point about money.
Also, let’s say that I *AM* a “trusted source” and you are not. When you RT my original post, that tinyurl is now vouched for by YOU and not ME, so people are going to be less likely to click on it and I miss out on someone reading/seeing what I have to say/show.
Plus, your RT would have been a location where billcammack.com would have gone into Twitter Search again, instead of sending TinyURL in there twice. That doesn’t help me if I want people to be able to find billcammack.com.
I would understand it if Twitter allowed you to input more than 140 characters and then TRIED to shorten what you wrote by shortening any links it found. That’s a convenience and makes sense. As it stands now, you can put a long URL in and use up all of your 140 characters, and then when Twitter shortens it for you, you end up with a post with many fewer characters than you could have used to express yourself, had you been given the number of characters left AFTER link-shortening.
Thanks for the link back I remember when a lot of twitter clones came on the scene people had an uproar over the auto shortner so I remembered that fact. Great post by the way.
Jay