Hi there,
Twitter disabled the automatic URL shortening if there is any
slowness or other problem accessing the shortener. We make a best
effort to automatically shorten but we don't want to return HTTP 500
simply because a shortening service failed to respond in time. As far
as bit.ly goes, they do have an API [1] for getting all of the short
versions of a long URL, so you might want to give that a shot. We've
talked many times about the shortened/lengthened URL issue in search
and hopefully we'll come up with a scalable solution at some point.
It's not something I expect in the near term, however.
Thanks;
– Matt Sanford / @mzsanford
Twitter Dev
[1] - http://bit.ly/apidocs
On Jun 18, 2009, at 6:38 AM, Bjoern wrote:
Hi,
I just wanted to look into the URL shortening issues, but found that I
could not get Twitter to shorten my URLs anymore. Has Twitter dropped
the practice of using bit.ly?
I am very interested in the reverse lookup - finding tweets that link
to a given web site. I think it would have been next to impossible to
do with bit.ly anyway, so if Twitter dropped it again, cheers to that!
At least with tinyurl there was a high likelyhood that all tinyurls
pointing to a given web site would be the same. As far as I can tell
bit.ly does not even give you the option to create a "common" URL via
the API - all URLs would be specific to the API caller.
It would be great if eventually Twitter could support searching for
URLs (and finding all of it's variants), similar to the recently
announced TweetMeme API. The TweetMeme API is interesting, but too
(rate) limited - also missing JSONP. Besides, it would really make
sense if Twitter would support this directly.
Björn
