VISIONN Creative Marketing

By Sean Cornwall

With all of the simple elegance and ease of use that Twitter is bringing to the table, there is one small issue that I’m completely dumbfounded by. Why TinyURL?

A quick primer: Twitter is a Web application that allows users to easily post brief text updates, or in the Twitter universe, “tweets.” These are short bursts of text, 140 characters or fewer, that allow users to rapidly post topical thoughts as frequently as the mood strikes them. The 140 character limit forces you to be concise, sometimes even terse, with your message. In the online world of repurposed content and keyword-stuffing, it’s refreshing to be able to gather—or spread—ideas in efficient, bite-sized chunks. However, It doesn’t take long to run into one of the key limitations: if you want to add a URL link to your message, the number of characters in the URL will count towards the 140 character limit. This means that the deep link to your recent blog post will leave you with roughly 4 or 5 words to describe it. Luckily, there were tools specifically designed to solve this problem: enter TinyURL.

TinyURL is a Web service that takes your long, ugly URL and shortens it to something simple, like “http://tinyurl.com/6xy”. There are several similar services on the Web, with a wide array of unique functionalities and benefits. TinyURL offers shortened links that never expire and don’t break in email repostings. TinyURLs also allow you to hide affiliate links—a common yet shady practice that has become one of their selling points. TinyURL is incredibly easy to use: you simply paste your URL into a form and it spits out the shorter version, ready to be copied. The service was popular enough among Twitter users that Twitter now automatically converts any URL over 30 characters into a nice, tidy, TinyURL. Perfect, right? Hardly.

Before I start complaining, let me say this: I am not a standardista. I am a designer who focuses on writing HTML and CSS as carefully and semantically as possible, and I validate everything I produce. I add comments if things look a little confusing. I pay attention to details because it’s my job. Keeping things perfectly standards-compliant is a goal, but there are certainly times I have been forced to compromise.

TinyURL is the perfect example of such a compromise. Yes, it shortens your links on Twitter so that you can squeeze in a little bit more descriptive text. Yes, it’s easy to jot down or mention to a coworker. The problem is that is makes a URL (a Uniform Resource Locator) into a service-dependent alias. As the Twitter universe fills with TinyURL links that have no indication of the content to which they link, the signal to noise ratio of the Web gets a little bit worse. Imagine if every link on the Internet was just a random string of characters, and anytime you clicked a link, whatever page you landed on would hopefully be what you were looking for. It’s the Internet equivalent of “Let’s Make a Deal.” It also provides spammers and affiliate-pimps with a powerful tool—one which they are already exploiting.

There is also the question of whether we should be entrusting the hosting and redirection of all of these links to a service that may not be around in the future. I realize Web technologies change at an incredibly rapid pace, and no one can expect everything on the Web to be anything more than transitory, but with Twitter’s adoption of the TinyURL technology we are left without an alternative. The folks at Twitter are certainly smart enough to have vetted the TinyURL service as thoroughly as possible, and I’m sure it’s not in any danger of disappearing soon, but there is still a possibility of all of those neat little links being rendered completely useless in one fell swoop if the TinyURL servers happened to be on the fritz. Twitter, of course, is no stranger to inconvenient outages, but if all the links in all the posts in every user’s account suddenly just didn’t work, I have the feeling the cutesy “fail whale” image would do little to assuage the tweetrage(™).

So what’s the solution? Allowing users to create actual HTML text links would be ideal, but would be a significant change to the fantastically simple Twitter UI, a difficult update for many 3rd party Twitter apps (like Twitteriffic) and impossible for people using SMS or similar technologies to post. Twitter could absorb TinyURL and host the service themselves, which would ensure that it would be around as long as Twitter would be, but wouldn’t solve the problem of creating millions (billions? trillions?) of non-semantic blind links. It seems there is no perfect solution—the question is how we’ll choose to compromise. So, in honor of Twitter’s excellent crowdsourcing abilities, I’ll ask the Internet: how do we fix it?