Are all links going to be wrapped or only long links? If it's the latter, what's the definition?
1. This affects how we count characters before sending and has quite a potential to go wrong, since we'll now need to know exactly which links are going to be wrapped in a tweet. 2. It's also going to be tricky for apps that currently show a live character count (like SimplyTweet and many other iPhone Twitter apps and possibly web sites) as users type. -- Hwee-Boon On Jun 9, 6:57 am, Raffi Krikorian <ra...@twitter.com> wrote: > hi all. > > twitter has been wrapping links in e-mailed DMs for a couple months > now<http://bit.ly/twttldmemail>. > with that feature, we're trying to protect users against phishing and other > malicious attacks. the way that we're doing this is that any URL that comes > through in a DM gets currently wrapped with a twt.tl URL -- if the URL turns > out to be malicious, Twitter can simply shut it down, and whoever follows > that link will be presented with a page that warns them of potentially > malicious content. in a few weeks, we're going to start slowly enabling this > throughout the API for all statuses as well, but instead of twt.tl, we will > be using t.co. > > practically, any tweet that is sent through statuses/update that has a link > on it will have the link automatically converted to a t.co link on its way > through the Twitter platform. if you fetch any tweet created after this > change goes live, then its text field will have all its links automatically > wrapped with t.co links. when a user clicks on that link, Twitter will > redirect them to the original URL after first confirming with our database > that that URL is not malicious. on top of the end-user benefit, we hope to > eventually provide all developers with aggregate usage data around your > applications such as the number of clicks people make on URLs you display > (it will, of course, be in aggregate and not identifiable manner). > additionally, we want to be able to build services and APIs that can make > algorithmic recommendations to users based on the content they are > consuming. gathering the data from t.co will help make these possible. > > our current plan is that no user will see a t.co URL on twitter.com but we > still have some details to work through. the links will still be displayed > as they were sent in, but the target of the link will be the t.co link > instead. and, we want to provide the same ability to display original links > to developers. we're going to use the entities attribute to make this > possible. > > let's say i send out the following tweet: "you have to check > outhttp://dev.twitter.com!"; > > a returned (and truncated) status object may look like: > > { > "text" : "you have to check outhttp://t.co/s9gfk2d4!";, > ... > "user" : { > "screen_name" : "raffi", > ... > }, > ... > "entities" : { > "urls" : [ > { > "url" : "http://t.co/s9gfk2d4";, > "display_url" : "http://dev.twitter.com";, > "indices" : [23, 43] > } > ], > ... > }, > ... > > } > > two things to note: the text of the returned status object doesn't have the > original URL and instead it has a t.co URL, and the entities block now has a > display_url attribute associated with it. what we're hoping is that with > this data, it should be relatively easy to create a UI where you replace > thehttp://t.co/s9gfk2d4in the text with the equivalent of > > <a href="http://t.co/s9gfk2d4";>http://dev.twitter.com</a> > > this means the user would not see the t.co link, but we all can still > provide the protection and gather data from the wrapped link. for the > applications that don't choose to update, the t.co link will be shown (and > the goal to protect users will be met). i just want to emphasize -- we > really do hope that you all render the original URL, but please send the > user through the t.co link. if you do choose to prefetch all the URLs on a > timeline, then, when a user actually clicks on one of the links, please > still send him or her through t.co. We will be updating the TOS to require > you to check t.co and register the click. > > related to this: the way the Twitter API counts characters is going to > change ever so slightly. our 140 characters is now going to be defined as > 140 characters after link wrapping. t.co links are of a predictable length > -- they will always be 20 characters. after we make this live, it will be > feasible to send in the text for a status that is greater than 140 > characters. the rule is after the link wrapping, the text transforms to 140 > characters or fewer. we'll be using the same logic that is in > twitter-text-rb to figure out what is a URL. > > look for an update to dev.twitter.com where we'll have a best practices > document on how to use these t.co links. > > what's the timeline? "soon" we'll enable this on @twitterapi, @rsarver, > @raffi, and a few other test accounts so you all have live data to play > with. on the timescale of weeks (to potentially a month or two), we'll roll > this out to everybody. > > of course, if there are any questions, just feel free to direct them to > @twitterapi! > > -- > Raffi Krikorian > Twitter Platform Teamhttp://twitter.com/raffi
