Comments on: Cake is great, Twitter is good, short URLs can die

By: Preben Liland Madsen

Preben Liland Madsen — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 07:36:31 +0000

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.

By: Thomas Kjelsrud

Thomas Kjelsrud — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 07:14:20 +0000

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

By: Preben Liland Madsen

Preben Liland Madsen — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 06:16:19 +0000

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.

By: Thomas Kjelsrud

Thomas Kjelsrud — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 11:54:35 +0000

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.

By: Ben Rosenthal

Ben Rosenthal — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:06:28 +0000

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.

By: Thomas Kjelsrud

Thomas Kjelsrud — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 14:44:48 +0000

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.

By: Jo Ring Giske

Jo Ring Giske — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 12:59:49 +0000

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.

By: Vegard Sandvold

Vegard Sandvold — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 12:15:04 +0000

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.