[twitter-dev] Re: Safe url shorteners
Just wanted to let you guys know about a free service we're prototyping for shortening URL's that overcomes a few of the limitations of other shorteners. Only one problems with all these URL shorteners, when the companies creating them disappear all their shortened URLs become orphans and therefore useless. Not a major problem on Twitter because of the typical transience of data, but when you run a company like mine that needs to reference historic data it will definitely create future problems when these companies fail. Just something for folks to consider ... Owkaye
[twitter-dev] Re: Safe url shorteners
. Interesting mods. Would I be able to use it with my own domain (Fol.la for branding)? FYI 1. inserted a link that it said was not valid (but works fine) 2. does not give me screenshot prior On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 3:11 PM, Kevin Mesiab ke...@mesiablabs.com wrote: Just wanted to let you guys know about a free service we're prototyping for shortening URL's that overcomes a few of the limitations of other shorteners. http://rt.nu/api/ Specifically shortened links include a screen shot 'preview' w/ a continue/cancel option and the full URL is displayed *before* redirecting users to prevent NSFW accidents ;) and other subversive tricks used by spammers and hackers. (ex: http://rt.nu/iqzh). The API lets you: 1.) Shorten links 2.) Dereference the original url of a shortened link 3.) Click throughs 4.) Referrers 5.) Velocity (clicks per hour) 6.) Rank (ctr vs all other rt.nu links) If you end up implementing RT.nu or playing with the API, we'd really appreciate any feedback. -- Kevin Mesiab CEO, Mesiab Labs L.L.C. http://www.mesiablabs.com
[twitter-dev] Re: Safe url shorteners
That's a valid concern that we share in our retweet.com application. We dereference all shortened urls before indexing tweets. In anticipation, rt.nu supplies the API call /api/stats/[short]/originalhttp://rt.nu/api/stats/8kw/original to grab the original url for archiving or displaying to end users. Dale: All links are dereferenced by rt.nu to be qualified before shortening. Currently in beta, we've set the qualifications a bit tight and urls that redirect using some schemes will be rejected, and some bad http status headers will also cause rejection. This will be cleaned up a bit before full public deployment. At present, all urls use rt.nu as the root domain and are typically between 7 and 10 characters. Screenshots are gathered via http://www.thumbshots.com/ which works like this: 1.) If the full url exists in the cache its image is returned, then the url is queued for a new shot. 2.) If the full url does not exist in the cache as a screenshot, the root domain is looked up. If the root domain is in the cache, that shot is returned and the full url is queued for a new shot. On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 12:34 PM, owkaye owk...@gmail.com wrote: Just wanted to let you guys know about a free service we're prototyping for shortening URL's that overcomes a few of the limitations of other shorteners. Only one problems with all these URL shorteners, when the companies creating them disappear all their shortened URLs become orphans and therefore useless. Not a major problem on Twitter because of the typical transience of data, but when you run a company like mine that needs to reference historic data it will definitely create future problems when these companies fail. Just something for folks to consider ... Owkaye -- Kevin Mesiab CEO, Mesiab Labs L.L.C. http://twitter.com/kmesiab http://mesiablabs.com http://retweet.com
[twitter-dev] Re: Safe url shorteners
You may want to check what thumbshots is doing with the URL http://google.com/ . It's definitely not taking a screenshot of the correct site … -- Chris Thomson On 15-Jul-09, at 7:06 PM, Kevin Mesiab wrote: That's a valid concern that we share in our retweet.com application. We dereference all shortened urls before indexing tweets. In anticipation, rt.nu supplies the API call /api/stats/[short]/ original to grab the original url for archiving or displaying to end users. Dale: All links are dereferenced by rt.nu to be qualified before shortening. Currently in beta, we've set the qualifications a bit tight and urls that redirect using some schemes will be rejected, and some bad http status headers will also cause rejection. This will be cleaned up a bit before full public deployment. At present, all urls use rt.nu as the root domain and are typically between 7 and 10 characters. Screenshots are gathered via http://www.thumbshots.com/ which works like this: 1.) If the full url exists in the cache its image is returned, then the url is queued for a new shot. 2.) If the full url does not exist in the cache as a screenshot, the root domain is looked up. If the root domain is in the cache, that shot is returned and the full url is queued for a new shot. On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 12:34 PM, owkaye owk...@gmail.com wrote: Just wanted to let you guys know about a free service we're prototyping for shortening URL's that overcomes a few of the limitations of other shorteners. Only one problems with all these URL shorteners, when the companies creating them disappear all their shortened URLs become orphans and therefore useless. Not a major problem on Twitter because of the typical transience of data, but when you run a company like mine that needs to reference historic data it will definitely create future problems when these companies fail. Just something for folks to consider ... Owkaye -- Kevin Mesiab CEO, Mesiab Labs L.L.C. http://twitter.com/kmesiab http://mesiablabs.com http://retweet.com
[twitter-dev] Re: Safe url shorteners
Thumbshots.com is a paid service too. Major fail. On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 1:09 PM, Chris Thomson chri...@chris24.ca wrote: You may want to check what thumbshots is doing with the URL http://google.com/ . It's definitely not taking a screenshot of the correct site … -- Chris Thomson On 15-Jul-09, at 7:06 PM, Kevin Mesiab wrote: That's a valid concern that we share in our retweet.com application. We dereference all shortened urls before indexing tweets. In anticipation, rt.nu supplies the API call /api/stats/[short]/originalhttp://rt.nu/api/stats/8kw/original to grab the original url for archiving or displaying to end users. Dale: All links are dereferenced by rt.nu to be qualified before shortening. Currently in beta, we've set the qualifications a bit tight and urls that redirect using some schemes will be rejected, and some bad http status headers will also cause rejection. This will be cleaned up a bit before full public deployment. At present, all urls use rt.nu as the root domain and are typically between 7 and 10 characters. Screenshots are gathered via http://www.thumbshots.com/ which works like this: 1.) If the full url exists in the cache its image is returned, then the url is queued for a new shot. 2.) If the full url does not exist in the cache as a screenshot, the root domain is looked up. If the root domain is in the cache, that shot is returned and the full url is queued for a new shot. On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 12:34 PM, owkaye owk...@gmail.com wrote: Just wanted to let you guys know about a free service we're prototyping for shortening URL's that overcomes a few of the limitations of other shorteners. Only one problems with all these URL shorteners, when the companies creating them disappear all their shortened URLs become orphans and therefore useless. Not a major problem on Twitter because of the typical transience of data, but when you run a company like mine that needs to reference historic data it will definitely create future problems when these companies fail. Just something for folks to consider ... Owkaye -- Kevin Mesiab CEO, Mesiab Labs L.L.C. http://twitter.com/kmesiab http://mesiablabs.com http://retweet.com -- Kevin Mesiab CEO, Mesiab Labs L.L.C. http://twitter.com/kmesiab http://mesiablabs.com http://retweet.com
[twitter-dev] Re: Safe url shorteners
got this message below after clicking yes on do I want to continue, from one of your sites. My first impression of this feature is not so good for a few reasons, the least of which is the annoyance factor... Oops, Retweet.com hiccupped. Here's why: This cloud node could not resolve the ReTweet server. On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 4:13 PM, Kevin Mesiab ke...@mesiablabs.com wrote: Thumbshots.com is a paid service too. Major fail. On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 1:09 PM, Chris Thomson chri...@chris24.ca wrote: You may want to check what thumbshots is doing with the URL http://google.com/ . It's definitely not taking a screenshot of the correct site … -- Chris Thomson On 15-Jul-09, at 7:06 PM, Kevin Mesiab wrote: That's a valid concern that we share in our retweet.com application. We dereference all shortened urls before indexing tweets. In anticipation, rt.nu supplies the API call /api/stats/[short]/originalhttp://rt.nu/api/stats/8kw/original to grab the original url for archiving or displaying to end users. Dale: All links are dereferenced by rt.nu to be qualified before shortening. Currently in beta, we've set the qualifications a bit tight and urls that redirect using some schemes will be rejected, and some bad http status headers will also cause rejection. This will be cleaned up a bit before full public deployment. At present, all urls use rt.nu as the root domain and are typically between 7 and 10 characters. Screenshots are gathered via http://www.thumbshots.com/ which works like this: 1.) If the full url exists in the cache its image is returned, then the url is queued for a new shot. 2.) If the full url does not exist in the cache as a screenshot, the root domain is looked up. If the root domain is in the cache, that shot is returned and the full url is queued for a new shot. On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 12:34 PM, owkaye owk...@gmail.com wrote: Just wanted to let you guys know about a free service we're prototyping for shortening URL's that overcomes a few of the limitations of other shorteners. Only one problems with all these URL shorteners, when the companies creating them disappear all their shortened URLs become orphans and therefore useless. Not a major problem on Twitter because of the typical transience of data, but when you run a company like mine that needs to reference historic data it will definitely create future problems when these companies fail. Just something for folks to consider ... Owkaye -- Kevin Mesiab CEO, Mesiab Labs L.L.C. http://twitter.com/kmesiab http://mesiablabs.com http://retweet.com -- Kevin Mesiab CEO, Mesiab Labs L.L.C. http://twitter.com/kmesiab http://mesiablabs.com http://retweet.com
