Twitter: Leave my URLs Alone
Twitter has an annoying feature: it auto-shortens URLs. You might think this is useful given the 140 character Tweet limit, but in fact the opposite is often true. In many cases, the URL itself is self-descriptive. Let’s make up an example:
This is hilarious: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/freemanic_paracusia.png
That tweet takes 70 characters, and is self-descriptive. You can tell I’m linking to an XKCD comic, and you even know which one. Despite being well-within the 140 character limit, Twitter changes it to this:
This is hilarious: http://tinyurl.com/5gmpbn
They cut it from 70 to 44 characters…but why? It wasn’t anywhere near the 140 character limit. And what the hell does that Tweet describe? For all you know, I’m Rick-Rolling you. To give my Tweet context, I now have to describe it:
This XKCD comic is hilarious: http://tinyurl.com/5gmpbn
That’s 55 characters, but you still don’t know which comic I’m linking to. I could add more description:
This XKCD Freemanic Paracusia comic is hilarious: http://tinyurl.com/5gmpbn
Which brings us up to 75 characters, longer than the original Tweet with the full URL. (And I might still be Rick-Rolling you.)
Hacking a Workaround
Because Twitter does this automatically, without any explanation, I find myself spending more time on Tweets trying to find workarounds to avoid the URL tampering. I’ve tried posting URLs without “http://”, and that seemed to work for a week or so.
Then I posted this Tweet, and as you can see, they shortened AND BROKE the URL!
One surefire workaround: post an upside down URL. But that won’t render in many Twitter clients, Twhirl for one.
Content Tampering
Twitter is mostly just harmless fun, often a waste of time, but I find it enjoyable. Who cares, right? But…my Tweets are MY WORDS. Given that URLs often describe their destination, I choose my words in combination with URLs to say something specific. Cramming a coherent thought down to 140 characters is a challenging and fun exercise, and it is very frustrating when a flawed algorithm changes what I type without asking.
In fact, I think this problem is more profound. Changing what people write without asking permission is in fact a misquotation:
Omission of important context: The context can be important for determining the overall argument the quoted person wanted to make…
I argue that URLs often provide context, and our words — even URLs — should not be changed without permission. I suggest Twitter add a preference option allowing users to enable or disable this feature. Sadly, the broken URL shortening occurs whether you Tweet from the web or a Twitter client.
- Here is a getsatisfaction.com problem describing the issue.
What is more irritating is when people post a really long stream of numbers and it blows out the test width such that I have to un-follow someone so I can read the rest of the tweets on the web.
@Michael 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999% of my followers were annoyed by that tweet. (I just deleted it)
We don’t need no URL-short’ning,
We don’t need no Surf-Control.
No dark censorship in the browser.
Hey! Twitter! Leave those URLs alone!
I think that it’s a potentially useful feature, but it should only be invoked if the tweet is too long (and there should be a prompt at that).
My solution? Use tinyurl.com rather than the Twitter attempt and give it a unique name (tinyurl.com/xkcd).
@Andrew that’s good advice, and I’ve done that myself a few times. I find that even when I do that, the Twitter home page truncates those URLs and shows “…”, which is just weird.
I feel your pain. Worried about Rick-Rolling urls? tinyurl’s preview option is your friend. http://tinyurl.com/preview.php . Doesn’t solve the real problem (context) but does add some safety.
@Eric “Changing what people write without asking permission is in fact a misquotation:” And we know, it’s hard enough not getting misquoted on your own blog without Twitter screwing with your URL’s.
It is dumber than dumb… but what do you expect from Twitter? Twitter was not thought out at all - nobody expected it to survive more than a week.
JLS
Eric,
In strictly REST terms, URLs ought to be opaque and the hypermedia directory (i.e. the twitter message) ought to describe them for human or machine consumption. You should not be embedding information about the resource in the URL (see http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#uri-opacity for details). The problem you describe is more of an externality caused by the limit on tweet-length.
I think twitter are doing fine by the standards of the web. That we are abusing URLs to our own ends (embedded semantics) ought not to reflect poorly on twitter.
Dhanji.
@Dhanji that is a great “classroom theory” answer that does not reflect the reality of how people use Twitter. I could not disagree more.
Eric, with all due respect, I think @Dhanji is correct. Web 3.0 will go even further to eliminate the relevance of URLs. “SEO Friendly” and “human readable” URLs have no place in the semantic web and will be rendered irrelevant. If you don’t believe me, read more about it here: http://snipurl.com/2w5ik.
@MaD: There is no way that any business is going to give up a nice human readable URL for any current or proposed standard. Nor a future business going to give up the opportunity to create one. The URL names business use are tied too close to their marketing strategy, and the URL’s people register for themselves are like personal license plates for the information highway (sorry, shameless use of a pun). That’s just not going to change. No more than 1 800 TICKET-1 will change (for those speeders who need their tickets “adjusted”). URL’s, 1 (800) numbers, even catchy business names like “Pampered Pets” have always been meaningful as is, and will always continue to be. I wouldn’t want Twitter changing my URL if it conveyed something meaningful.
I think the heart of the argument is Eric and others would like the option of whether to allow twitter to change or omit information that they as authors deem important enough to risk the max twitter length to use. Choice is usually a good thing, given enough rope….
I hate this SO much about Twitter, and posted on their http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/topics/why_the_mandatory_tinyurls board.
@Andres Min: that trick doesn’t work any more. Twitter has switched to bit.ly, but even if you choose a custom name on bit.ly and tweet that, Twitter will still shorten it.
While I agree that Twitter should only shorten links when needed, you could (and should) have used the direct link to the comic XKCD provides. http://xkcd.com/462/