"routing links through this service will eventually contribute to the metrics behind our Promoted Tweets platform and provide an important quality signal for our Resonance algorithm"
So this is Twitter's Digg bar: they want to wrap and trace every link that goes in a Tweet? So much for all those custom bit.ly domains. So much for bit.ly.
These guys are going crass quick. @alex's decision to quit is less and less surprising.
And this is great news, as far as I'm concerned. Generic shortened URLs are becoming a plague upon the web and are marginally useful at best outside of Twitter. Even more props to Twitter for demystifying links where applicable instead of taking the easier route of pure obscurity. The sooner third-party shorteners disappear from Twitter the sooner they can disappear from the rest of the web and we can have link transparency back again.
On a related note, I'm actually quite happy that Twitter is starting to close up their platform. People can stop pretending it's some open platform for global communication and finally realize it's a novel service thanks to its popularity, but little more.
Generic shortened URLs are becoming a plague upon the web and are marginally useful at best outside of Twitter
Marginally useful at best outside of Twitter? Care to explain? Less than 1% of bitly's traffic is coming from twtitter, so obviously there are other people that find value in trackable URLs... I'm curious why you think it isn't useful?
For those that also live in the 21st century, yes. Which mail clients don't render HTML? Perhaps the users who still use ancient mail clients should consider switching, or endure reading HTML. I'm not going optimize for the minority by making web sites in plain text either for the few users who refuse to use a web browser.
That's not true. Their API will now return the t.co URLs in the text section, so if developers don't do anything extra, things will (should, rather, I'm clarifying with them) still work, but t.co URLs will be displayed to users.
Their API will return the original links too with markers, so client code can be updated to display the original URLs. Twitter wants developers to display the original URLs and link to the t.co URLs.
Their rational behind this is flawed. One of the reason they are giving for implementing this is to be able to shut down links if they turn out to be malicious, possibly as a bait and switch. But since the right way to do a shortener is to do a 301 and that's what they say they are doing, they wouldn't have that ability.
So this is Twitter's Digg bar: they want to wrap and trace every link that goes in a Tweet? So much for all those custom bit.ly domains. So much for bit.ly.
These guys are going crass quick. @alex's decision to quit is less and less surprising.