this is a topic of interest to me for a long while. been meaning to start a thread.
i'm often bothered by the automatic shortening of urls when in fact the url does not need to be shortened. in these cases, i of course do not want to hide the real url by using a forced 3rd party service like bit.ly. i have use cases where all that is posted is a url. and the url includes a long detailed description of the link. this, in my opinion, is smart as the only object to maintain is the url itself which provides a hyperlink and a short message combined. sometimes, these use cases are using natural language vanity urls to form short sentences. ie. http://john.tot.al.ly/wiped-out-on-this-huge-wave-in-hawaii-at-the-Surf-Hawaii-Surf-School-on-the-island-of-Oahu the other annoying thing that is related to the twitter UI is how long urls are cut-off//trimmed even if they dont need to be. the above example would be destroyed because it would result in something like: http://john.tot.al.ly/wip.... actually, i'm not certain if that is still the case as it seems to me that every url is shortened with bit.ly now. i grok the value in tracking urls and bit.ly may be bought by twitter at some point and this notion of url tracking will be fully integrated.... but the debate about url shortners in general.... how they can break the natural web, are vulnerable to massive broken links and simply thr cryptic format itself that hides the true location.... are all to be considered and continued to be debated. at the very least, 3rd party developers should get an override toggle. that is something i think we all need to start demanding. and yes, an official doc explaining the current and future impementations of url shortening on twitter is definitely needed now. http://plea.se/twitter-dont-shorten-this-url-with-bitly-since-it-does-not-need-to-be-shortened-with-8-available-characters-remaining http://twitter.com/sull/status/2534470050 @sull On Jul 8, 4:50 am, Swaroop <rh.swar...@gmail.com> wrote: > "However, if you paste in a link that is less than 30 characters, > we'll post it in its entirety. If it's longer than 30 characters, > we'll convert it to a shorter URL." > > Source:http://help.twitter.com/portal