Via Jacob Grier, a very convincing post against URL shorteners.

The worst problem is that shortening services add another layer of indirection to an already creaky system. [...] The extra layer of indirection slows down browsing with additional DNS lookups and server hits. A new and potentially unreliable middleman now sits between the link and its destination. [...] The clicker can’t even tell by hovering where a link will take them, which is bad form.

I completely agree. (Actually, it turns out that I complained about TinyURL back in 2004 [in a post that now has a mildly broken permalink, amusingly enough].)

I think these services were useful for their original purpose (reducing the likelihood that copy-pasted links would break in emails/Usenet posts). I never understood why people started using them instead of direct links on the web, but I hoped that they would die out, one silver lining to the HTML email cloud.

Then came Twitter! I enjoy working with the 140-character limit, and it does make sense to use shortened URLs in this case. If people would restrict their use of shortened URLs to Twitter, the downsides wouldn’t bug me much - Twitter is kind of supposed to be ephemeral, so the effects of link rot are not terrible, and if a service did get hacked, the news would spread quickly enough! But this has caused a general resurgence of the fad (again, I don’t understand it), and it’s driving me nuts again.

I’m tempted to say that Twitter caused this problem and ought to fix it. I see two possible ways to do that: Twitter could roll their own URL shortener, ensuring that as long as Twitter is around, links in tweets will work. (This might require blocking use of other URL shorteners, which sounds attractive to me although of course it’s not that simple.) Or Twitter could create some sort of “relevant link” field so URLs wouldn’t need to go in tweets at all. (I think this would be great; people doing Twitter by SMS can’t click links anyway.)

It might be too late, though - now that everybody and their local newspaper is on Twitter, the strange attraction of the short obfuscated URL might have spread too far to be stopped.

P.S. Naturally, the first thing I wanted to do when I read the above-linked post was Twitter it. I thought it would have been kind of funny to use a link shortener, but it turned out that I fit the link in without a problem. Then Twitter automatically turned it into a TinyURL link. Thank you, Twitter.

Posted by Amanda in Tech |