As you can see from the widget on the right, I’m using Twitter these days to spout all sorts of random nonsense. Twitter is a wonderful thing, and I’ve found it useful, and quite entertaining.
Thing is, I see something of a major flaw with it, and it extends outside of Twitter. Due to the fact ‘tweets’ have to be 140 characters long, if you want to post a URL (link) to something, people will often shorten them using one of the many services such as TinyUrl, Tr.im, Bit.ly, or Is.gd. The end result being that your original URL, turns from this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8026736.stm
to this:
We now have a considerably shorter URL to post, which saves a lot of space in the tweet.
My problem with it, is that the URL could link to anything! In this instance, it does link to the article above. But it could go anywhere! Any how else would I know until I click it.
TinyURL thought of that particular problem and introduced a preview feature, so the URL http://preview.tinyurl.com/cakpdn actually takes you to a TinyURL page which tells you where the link goes to. You can turn on a cookie to always make it go there, then you choose to click through if you trust the domain. But not all the providers do that. Bit.ly don’t seem to and besides, it relies on the person posting the link using the preview URL, or the person visiting the link having the cookie enabled, both of which rarely happen.
We also end up with URL blindness, and people will just click on them regardless, and end up at a plethora of sites. Most of the links I see go past in my Twitter feed are shortened somehow, and without the context of the tweet are mostly meaningless. How long before they are accepted entirely, and start appearing in Phishing emails and the like? We could end up with shortened URLs firing people off to all sorts of sites.
There have been suggestions by some for the domains hosting the content to provide their own URLs. Personally, I think this is by far the best method, as it means you can instantly see which domain the link goes to and know with a better level of certainty that you’re going to end up where you expect to. Trouble is, it relies on the domain owners implementing something themselves, which they might be reluctant to do, seeing services like twitter as a flash in the pan (I don’t think it is).
A short-term solution might be for the short-URL providers to send short URLs to a landing page, so you can see where the link goes, and if it is malicious or not what it said, flag it as such (although they could be open to abuse as well).
It’s a tricky subject really. Just click carefully!
Basic rule of engineering: K.I.S.S. ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’. Use the long URL. If you’re posing somewhere that allows HTML, you can shorten the visible text. Even a long URL shows where and what the article is, and prevents link-rot if TinyURL goes down.