Use of Link shorteners on Twitter

[Ryan Lerch]

On 11/11/2015 10:53 AM, Chaoyi Zha wrote:
>
> Yes,  I'm aware that it is passed through t.co <http://t.co>. If it 
> counts the links as the same amount of characters,  we might still 
> want to keep the shortened URLs for aesthetics, as long links don't 
> look very good on mobile.
>
IMHO, a full link is more aesthetically appealing than a bunch of random 
characters, and more usable too -- you know what you are clicking on 
before you click it. Twitter, even though it passes thrrough their 
shortener, will display a portion (if not all) of the link in the 
timeline, rather than the shortened link.
>
> Unless you have a specific objection to using a shortener,  I'm assuming.
>
my objections to using link shorteners are pretty much summed up by this 
article:

http://oleb.net/blog/2012/08/please-dont-use-url-shorteners-on-twitter/

regards,
ryanlerch
>
> On Tue, Nov 10, 2015, 7:48 PM Ryan Lerch <rlerch at redhat.com 
> <mailto:rlerch at redhat.com>> wrote:
>
>     On 11/11/2015 10:34 AM, Ryan Lerch wrote:
>>     On 11/11/2015 10:03 AM, Chaoyi Zha wrote:
>>>     Hi Ryan,
>>>
>>>     I think the use of a link shortener is adequate for Twitter.
>>>     This is because they have a character limit, and using a
>>>     shortener greatly helps increase the amount of text you can have
>>>     in a tweet. Twitter counts your link's characters even though it
>>>     passes it through its own link gateway.
>>     This is incorrect -- try crafting a new tweet on twitter.com
>>     <http://twitter.com> with 115 characters, then add a link with
>>     more that 25 characters -- it will let you post it. All links on
>>     twitter go through the t.co <http://t.co> link shortener.
>>
>>     cheers,
>>     ryanlerch
>>>
>>>     Cheers,
>>>     Chaoyi
>>>
>>>     On Tue, 10 Nov 2015 at 19:01 Ryan Lerch <rlerch at redhat.com
>>>     <mailto:rlerch at redhat.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>>         Hi all,
>>>
>>>         Just wondering what people think about not using any link
>>>         shorteners on
>>>         the official Fedora twitter feed. Twitter actually passes
>>>         all links in
>>>         tweets through their own t.co/ <http://t.co/> link
>>>         shortener, so using another one is
>>>         just (IMHO) unnecessarily obfuscating the link from our
>>>         followers on
>>>         twitter. (twitter presents all t.co <http://t.co> links as
>>>         the full text, but the link
>>>         itself is t.co <http://t.co>)
>>>
>>>         Looking back through the feed, the main link shortener being
>>>         used is
>>>         ow.ly <http://ow.ly>, which i assume is being done by
>>>         whoever is using Hootsuite.
>>>
>>>         cheers,
>>>         ryanlerch
>>>         --
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>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>     Also, have a look at this tweet:
>
>     https://twitter.com/fedora/status/664172103525146624
>
>     If you inspect the link in that tweet, (or copy the link address
>     to see the href of it), you will see that the link is actaully
>     t.co <http://t.co>. So these links are passing through t.co
>     <http://t.co>, then redundantly redirecting on to ow.ly
>     <http://ow.ly>, then on to the actual site we want.
>
>     cheers,
>     ryanlerch
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>
>

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