Dan Lester

Twitter is used to share links, so why obscure them?

Twitter is designed as a low-attention system to mass-broadcast short messages, and I understand that the 140-character limit is an important restriction that ensures that is what it continues to be. However, this can be ‘gamed’ to fit long URLs (as in ‘most URLs’) into the message using URL-shortening services such as Tiny URL. That practice then leaves some Twitter pages (e.g. Hacker News) as just a long list of obscured links… Not only is that unhelpful for the reader, but it’s also against safe internet usage! We’re just following links with no idea where they’re going. (And wasting a small amount of bandwidth to boot…)

Personally, I see this as a great failure on Twitter’s part to respond to its users. The best advice given to startups is to watch how users are using the service, and adapt to fit their usage. Why not say that URLs just count for 10 characters, and your actual message is what needs to be brief?

I guess one argument for putting up with shortened-URLs is that you’re really clicking the link based on the fact your friend recommended it, and the reason they gave - not because of the destination per se. Given the limited space the friend has to describe the link, I sometimes find I’ve already seen the page, but only realise that once Tiny URL has sent me there…

From Twitter’s own perspective, it also pollutes the marketing message (adding ‘except for links’… to their tag line). It would be a bit tragic if people started encoding lengthy messages in the form of a dummy URL! Also, it is possible they have some reason to discourage Twitter from becoming a bookmarking service.

Anyway, this whole Tiny URL situation made me feel ill, so I built a GreaseMonkey script to convert all URLs into their redirected equivalents. Yes, I’m using the Twitter web site on the whole - I’m obviously scared of installing a decent client.

You can install GreaseMonkey for Firefox then find my script here.

To be sure of expanding all the various URL-shortening services reliably and consistently, it sends all links it finds on the page to a web service running on my server which then returns the results. This is because the GM httprequest function automatically follows redirects without worrying the script about it, whereas all along all the script wanted was to see the initial Location redirect.

Since I developed this, I’ve come across Power Twitter which is a full Firefox plugin (an xpi file). This does something similar (although displays the destination page’s title instead of the URL) and some other stuff too, related to Flickr and YouTube.

Does anyone know of a lightweight desktop Twitter client that shares my upset at these obscured links? Even so, it all seems a bit unnecessary when Twitter could solve everyone’s problems centrally in one go.

Or does anyone prefer the obscured URLs…?