Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Twitter’s t.co to Become Mandatory

Taylor Singletary:

October 10, 2011 - All URLs, regardless of length, will be wrapped by t.co

I’m not very happy about this, but I guess it’s about monetization.

4 Comments RSS · Twitter

[...] Twitter’s t.co to Become Mandatory → 5 seconds ago [...]

Great, just what Twitter needs: *Another single-point of failure*.

I've hounded Twitter about this before (because I worry about the long-term impacts on web-arch) and they assure me that the primary reason is for platform security and not monetization. Blocking a viral URL that is really an exploit is the example they like to throw around. I can appreciate the sentiment but I'm not sure they appreciate the impact URL shorteners will have on the web when look back 50+ years.

@Shawn I’ve heard the security argument as well, but how often does this happen? Regardless, it seems like most of the safety could be gotten by retroactively wrapping the few URLs that turn out to be bad, rather than pessimistically wrapping all of them.

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