As mentioned on TechCrunch, Evan Willams at Chirp confirmed that Twitter will sooner or later launch its own URL shortener, probably called twee.tt or twt.tl (both owned by Twitter). Well, let’s just hope that they do a good job at this. I’m talking about the future functionality and the links riot going on for quite a while.
It seems that more and more people and businesses are branding their Twitter accounts by using their own shortening services – fb.me by Facebook, goo.gl by Google, etc. We all hope that short URLs posted to Twitter will not be re-shortened using Twitter’s new service. This sometimes happens with the current shortening capabilities of Twitter, short links are sometimes re-shortened using bit.ly, causing a double redirect, which is awkward.
Statistics and analytics is another good part of bit.ly. Hope they don’t miss that too, which might also be a chance to get some extra cash in, offering businesses detailed analytics. But one issue still persists, on each and every URL shortener – rev canonical and shortlink HTTP headers.
If a page already has a short link assigned and perhaps branded, then it is the one that should be returned, without shortening the original. Of course you may want to run some checks to see if the short link is short enough, valid, etc. And this may be the confusing part – what if the short link provided by rev canonical or HTTP headers disappears? Well, how about “what if the page disappears?” ;)
Maybe such functionality may be in advanced settings for each Twitter account, but I’d really love if Twitter used my own short URLs when I post stuff from my blog instead of bit.ly or their future ones. I got my own analytics set up and I’m pretty sure everybody does, so why not give us a chance to brand ourselves a tiny bit?
Well, if that doesn’t work out then I’ll have to continue writing my own desktop/mobile Twitter client, or keep sending tickets to TweetDeck and Seesmic. How can we talk about HTML5 if things aren’t yet sorted out with rel and rev canonical. And what about IE6? Heh ;) Don’t mind me, I’m just thinking out loud.. Cheers!
