- Currently Listening to:
- Iron & Wine — Lovesong Of The Buzzard
Daniel Sandler is experimenting with using twitter for comments, and makes some very good points about comments on the web in the process. Essentially, he pulls in the content of any tweet that references his post’s full URL, TinyURL, or even just the TinyURL hash. This has the very nice effect of forcing people who want to comment on his post to own their words. Their comments will be public to their own audience, and so are more likely to be constructive and civil.
Tying your tweet to a particular page online is awkward though, due to Twitter’s 140-character limit. URLs were designed to be expressive, but not necessarily space-efficient (compare them to DOI or ISBN codes). Twitter’s recent rise has driven the increased use of URL-shortening services like TinyURL and bit.ly, which were originally designed because of the limitations of email clients that weren’t able to correctly break up an URL that was wider than the 80-character wide text columns used at the time.
We seem to have replaced one limitation with another though. By feeding all URLs through minimisation services, readers lose all context about the page they are about to open — is it a video? What domain is it on? Have I visited it before? There are some links that I would be disinclined to click on when using my iPhone, but with minimised URLs, you don’t know what you’ve got until it begins to load in. Plus, there’s the nightmare scenario that the URL service dies, and since their databases are kept private, all that information is lost.
I think URL shortening services could be obviated if Twitter started treating URLs a little differently. There are two main audiences for twitter tweets: mobile phone users who receive tweets as SMS messages (this is the original reason why twitter has 140-character limits), and users who visit the twitter website, or use one of the myriad desktop and smartphone applications to keep up with tweets. These users are not concerned about the character limit in the same way. I would expect this group of people to be growing faster than those who get tweets via SMS.
Ideally, Twitter would disregard URL content as part of the character limit. If you think about it, the URL http://tinyurl.com/cxt59m (this page) conveys almost no information whatsoever. It could as easily be replaced with some single-character replacement in SMS messages (whose users are much less likely to actually follow links than web/applications users anyway). [On further reflection, it is clear that this wouldn't work as I imagined, as the target URL for these single character links would still need to be encoded somewhere as part of the message.]
On the web, and in applications, URLs shouldn’t need to be minimised at all. Twitter clients could truncate URLs for display, but all the URL content should stay available to be used by those clients that want it.
- Daring Fireball: An Improved Liberal, Accurate Regex Pattern for Matching URLs
- Plugins | jQuery Plugins
- Magnet URI scheme - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The magnet: URI scheme is a draft open standard defining a URI scheme for magnet links, which are mainly used to reference resources available for download via peer-to-peer networks. Such a link typically identifies a file not by location or name, but by content; more precisely, by the content's cryptographic hash value.
Since it refers to a file based on content or metadata, rather than by location, a magnet link can be considered a kind of Uniform Resource Name, rather than the more common Uniform Resource Locators. Although it could be used for other applications, it is particularly useful in a peer-to-peer context, because it allows resources to be referenced without the need for a continuously available host.
- URLs are the Uniform Way to Locate Resources
When you hear the term URL, what do you think of? Probably a web address - e.g., a publicly accessible HTML page such as http://google.com/ or http://news.ycombinator.com/. But URLs have a much wider application.
- Canon
The non-profit organization ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), which maintains and regulates the Internet's addressing system, has rigorously evaluated the current gTLD string of characters' societal value, utilization purpose, and use in an organization's operations. At its International Public Meeting held in June 2008, however, ICANN approved the relaxation and liberalization of the new gTLD system adoption rules. Following this meeting, a number of disputes arose surrounding whether the entry procedures were fair and adequate, and it was expected that the new gTLD system would commence registration application within 2010 at the earliest. The new gTLD system is expected to allow a company name, brand name, geographic region, or service type to be used as a gTLD within website and e-mail addresses.
- WWW FAQs: What is the maximum length of a URL?
Extremely long URLs are usually a mistake. URLs over 2,000 characters will not work in the most popular web browser. Don't use them if you intend your site to work for the majority of Internet users.
- Ned Batchelder: Http-https transitions and relative URLs
If this reference appears in an HTTPS page, the mixed content warning will appear. How to craft a reference that works for both? The answer is again relative URLs, but using a more obscure syntax:
<img src='//fast.cdn.net/pix/smiley.jpg' />
- 301Works.org - URL shorteners working with Internet Archive for long-term preservation
The Internet Archive and founding companies announce today the launch of 301Works.org, a service to archive shortened Universal Resource Locators (URLs). This will enable redirect services to incorporate these shortened URLs when a member company ceases business activities.
- Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: the Ars Technica review - Ars Technica
In Snow Leopard, Apple has created a new, unified, comprehensive set of file system APIs built around a single data type: URLs. But these are URL "objects"—namely, the opaque data types NSURL and CFURL, with a toll-free bridge between them—that have been imbued with all the desirable attributes of an FSRef.
- tr.im URLs | tr.im to December 31, 2009
I wanted to make another update to make one thing clear some users have missed from the homepage notice: All tr.im links will continue to redirect until at least December 31, 2009. We will not be turning tr.im off for redirections.
- joshua's blog: on url shorteners
One important conclusion is that services providing transit (or at least require a shortening service) should at least log all redirects, in case the shortening services disappear. If the data is as important as everyone seems to think, they should own it. And websites that generate very long URLs, such as map sites, could provide their own shortening services. Or, better yet, take steps to keep the URLs from growing monstrous in the first place.
- StumbleUpon Returns to Original Owners - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
The announcement of StumbleUpon’s reacquisition follows a story my colleague Brad Stone reported last week, about how the original founders of Skype, an Internet calling service, may be in talks to purchase the company they sold to eBay in 2005 for $2.6 billion.
- The Security Implications of URL Shortening Services - Unweary
A hacker or spammer is empowered by using a "benign" URL shortening service that everyone uses and everyone trusts. Once the click is made, a homographic attack may follow and will make it very difficult for a normal user to detect that they are being redirected to a phishing site. The real danger is that people have become habituated to trusting unknown links from their friends. This is dangerous because if their friend's account is compromised, it might not be their friend sending a link and the shortened URL will be clicked without concern.
- Coding Horror: Url Shorteners: Destroying the Web Since 2002
Lame, yes, but it means that the typical, mainstream browser-based Twitter user is forced to become proficient with URL shortening services. Due to the increased exposure they've enjoyed through Twitter's meteoric rise to fame, the number of URL shortening services has exploded, and rapidly evolved -- they're no longer viewed as utility services to make URLs more convenient, but a way to subjugate, control, and perhaps worst of all, "monetize" the web experience.
- Facebook | Coming Soon: Facebook Usernames
We're planning to offer Facebook usernames to make it easier for people to find and connect with you. When your friends, family members or co-workers visit your profile or Pages on Facebook, they will be able to enter your username as part of the URL in their browser. This way people will have an easy-to-remember way to find you. We expect to offer even more ways to use your Facebook username in the future.
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