It's interesting to see the wave of URL shorteners spawned by the constraints Twitter put on its payload. Is the thinking that it's safer for individual organizations to have their own shortener rather than rely on the bit.ly's and tinyurl's of the world because in the future they'll be able to change where they point (e.g. if they adopt a new CMS with different URL scheme)?
It's also about branding and imaging. First, NPR gets its name out there more by always having it attached to the URL. Second, I'm much more likely to click an n.pr link that was passed along to me third-hand because I know it belongs to NPR, whereas I tend not to click bit.ly links because I have no idea where they link to. Another benefit is that if they own the link, they can track it.
At first I was not thinking the branded url shortening would be that big of a deal, but I admit I like seeing them. I don't have a problem with bit.ly links since I use tweetdeck to unshorten them before following them, but it's nice to know the target up front in the tweet.
I think it's a mixture of that, the similar reason that if the url shortener bubble pops, tinyurl or bit.ly could go under, and the branding. n.pr, especially if you've ever seen it before, lets people know it points to NPR's site even though it's shortened. Same with 4sq.com, post.ly, etc. One of the big disadvantages of url shorteners is that you have no idea whether it's the story tweet claims it is or child porn.
"... Is the thinking that it's safer for individual organizations to have their own shortener rather than rely on the bit.ly's and tinyurl's of the world ..."
If you have your own url shortening you can:
- infer from the logs
- you also have a definitive mapping of urls from short to long
A third party might be cost efficient in the short term but link rot on short url's at some time will be a problem. For a news organisation, the value of inference from logs (who, source, time) could be worth the cost. For a news organisation, authenticity as @jackowayed points out is a big plus.
I've often wondered why google didn't take over the shortening market a long time ago.
Interesting that they chose to save 3 characters on their short URLs via the tiny domain name, but are wasting 4 by using only numeric characters in their story slugs.
Nine numeric characters provide for a possible set of 1 billion unique story IDs. You can get roughly the same size set with five alpha numeric characters (even more if you toss in a couple of symbol characters).
I was under the impression that they reserved 20 7-bit characters for usernames in @replies, which would suggest that it is still limited due to SMS, no?
Yeah, but tweets aren't limited to the GSM 7-bit character set, so if you tweet in say, Russian, 140 characters is too much, because the whole message needs to be encoded using 2-byte characters.
Twitter's limitation is based on thinking around SMS, but it doesn't actually match up to real world SMS, because they didn't think through all the international language considerations. It's pretty botched up.
I think that whatever the original reason to limit tweets to 140 characters, it's become such a part of their identity that it would be foolish to change it...
