Morning all, I have just added this idea to Get Satisfaction (http://bit.ly/sN7Gh) that I think will be of interest to many of you:
"Please add support for the rel=shortlink (http://purl.org/net/ shortlink) standard so that Twtiter can detect short links from the site (HTTP headers and/or HTML code) rather than having to manufacture them itself using tinyurl.com, bit.ly, etc. This results in better quality (less opaque), more reliable links in a way that doesn't hurt the Internet." WordPress.com have just announced (http://bit.ly/7WlPp) that they have added rel=shortlink links to the HTTP headers and HTML HEAD of their 7 million hosted blogs (totaling well over 100 million pages) and this is in addition to a number of other high profile sites such as PHP.net and Ars Technica. It also just got a lot more interesting for clients to support the standard as doing so allows them to get better/faster/cheaper short links that will be at least as reliable as the site itself. A recent Pingdom report revealed shortener overheads running into many hundreds of milliseconds and yet in-house shorteners (especially those on the same domain) can have a negligible performance impact. @samj
