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Twitter is becoming increasingly popular and mainstream. We’ll go into some possible and slightly novel uses of Twitter to route the stream of communication to your site or blog. Twitters short message format creates a focused form of communication, but the tight limit enforces the increased use of shortened URLs, through services like bit.ly and tinyurl, creating an unnecessary layer of complexity while bringing some technical and semantic challenges along with it.
Create a view into the stream of communication
Twitter is becoming the main artery of micro-blogging and much of the communication and sharing is done within groups or tags (like this example on a trending topic of “Skittles”) which leads to categorized and up-to-date information. This increases the utility of searching Twitter as people all around are contributing and sharing.
Through smart queries (on Twitter Search) one can create “lenses” into the communication focusing on your topics of interest. Export this search result to a XML feed, and you have yourself a live stream of information, ready to lighten up any blog or web page. The chance of getting unrelated or malicious links into the feed is apparent, but it’s possible to filter on any number of authors (writers) using the “from” fields within Twitter Search.
You can also feed your newly written blog posts to Twitter in order to draw more attention and possible traffic using services like TwitterFeed.
Small URLs cause big problems
The 140 character limit of a Twitter post is a nice touch leading to a compact and to-the-point format of communication, however, the URLs attached should never have been counted towards this limit. The links should have been attached as meta data of the actual post, an easy addition to the service which would solve these issues. The ever increasing use of shorten-URL-services creates an unnecessary layer of complexity, and although a nice little hack, it makes it increasingly difficult to track the links within Twitter or other communities, requiring de-coding of these URLs to find the real URL.
To recap, we suggest that whenever using Twitter to post a message with a link, the link is simply extracted as metadata and thus not counted towards the message size limit. Removing the need for shortned URLs which creates an unnecessary layer of complexity and risk.
What if you were to search through twitter for everyone that’s tweeting about your blog post? How would you identify your blog URL within these immense data repositories? Even if you find every possible short-version of your blog URL; how would you go about searching for all posts from your blog-domain being twittered about? It’s impossible, because shorten-URL-services are removing your domain name and identity from the links created, you cannot search for partial URLs in order to find “everything” from yourblog.com. You would have to find every shortened version of every blog post URL, and them attempt to query.
What if one of these services were to fall flat to the pressure of capitalism and then shut down? Malfunctioning links would remain within Twitter and ever increasing search indexes. How do we go about de-coding these short-URLs at a later point? Should the code of these shortening sites be revealed? The service Tinyurl had downtime a while back, and the implications where discussed here and here. We also note that Tinyurl has a “alias” feature which allows you to manipulate the shortened URL, thus creating your own identity within it.
Thirdly, there is no way of separating a link from a trusted domain from potential malware links as discussed on spylogic.net.
Twitter is still new and attracts creative attention from bloggers and community members everywhere. We encourage your to participate on your blog or in a discussion right here, so that in time, the good can become great (like cake).
I like the idea of counting URLs outside the 140 character limit on Twitter messages. Short URLs are neither user-friendly nor SEO-friendly. It’s a need born out of technological limitations (and in this case artificial limitations). And they make us very vulnerable to phishing and spam.
Like you’re suggesting; let’s attach URLs as metadata on each tweet, freeing up some space for more meaningful words, without obfuscating the original, possibly keyword-rich URLs.
Another advantage is that you could have an anchortext as well. This would make it easy to make a meaningful Tweet with many links. Today it just looks garbled.
Both good suggestions, a combination with anchor text would indeed improve link quality, but might be difficult for some users to grasp. I guess it depends on how the clients implement this bit, which would also explain why this is an issue in the first place – Twitter as a service might not have focused on extending it for “richer” client functionality.
If URLs are separated out from the 140 characters of the tweet itself, how will people post them from a cell phone? The 140 character limit is based on the limitations of SMS, isn’t it? Should a second text be sent containing a URL that is then “reattached” to the original tweet?
I don’t know how popular it is to tweet by SMS, but that is still part of the Twitter userbase.
I’m uncertain about the volume of SMS use on twitter, and especially as to how many of these cell phone users would go to the trouble of shorting an URL through another site and then paste it into a SMS. I think these people would probably be on a computer with a Twitter client anyhow. That aside, I still think people could add short URLs to the messages if they please, but the protocol could also allow for longer ULRs to be meta-data in richer Twitter clients.
The idea is very good, and I’ve thought about it myself. But the links would still need to be counted towards the 140 character limit to avoid flooding or spamming or simply avoid people going around the 140 char limit by creating “fake” urls like; http://andbtwIwantedToSayThisButCouldntGetItInsideMyTweetILoveCake.com/ILoveCookiesaswell
I think there would be necessary to create both a limit to how many urls there could be in a tweet (for example 3 urls) aswell as having all the urls (no matter how long or short they were) count as 10 chars.
It may aswell (if possible) be a smart idea for Twitter to check whether the main domain in the post actually exists or not. With “main domain”; I think about youtube.com, tinyurl.com, google.com and “andbtwIwantedToSayThisButCouldntGetItInsideMyTweetILoveCake.com”. If Twitter could check if the main domain actually were used or owned by somone it could then determine whether or not the link provided should be provided with the advantages of posting a url (all urls just take up 10 chars) to the tweet or not.
Thank you for your comment Preben. Although you highlight a possible problem of people “abusing” the URL field, I don’t think this would be a major hurdle.
Long URLs can be a nuisance, but they wouldn’t have to displayed in clear text, the actual URL path could be visible when you pointed at the link, similar to what browsers do. The link itself could be a small picture or maybe just text saying “link”.
Keep pondering on good ideas! Cheers
Yes, I’m aware of the fact that long urls of course wouldn’t be displayed fully in the tweet. I think the best way to do it would be an icon. However, any “hidden” messages would still be seeable when hovering the text aswell as looking at the url when you see the urls doesn’t take you to a existing web page.
But as you do mention, the possibillity of it becoming a problem is not necessarily a big one, but I think Twitter would need to think of all possibillites where a new feature like this one could be a problem.
Anyway, there need to be some way to stop that way of abusing from happening, maybe aswell have a limit to how long a url could be. Although that of course could be a problem aswell in some rare cases.
I’m sure this discussion will prove useful, and I hope someone will write the ideas into an e-mail which can be sent to the Twitter developers, providing our ideas for it – so it can save them time, so they don’t have to think about everything if they want to make it.