Filed under: Text, Features, Social Software, Analysis
Should Twitter really count URL characters against you?
URL shorteners, while convenient, are bad for the web. They hide the true destination that they are pointing to, giving bad guys yet another tool in their arsenal, while conditioning web users to blindly trust the links they are clicking on. Further, as the debacle with tr.im showed us, URL shortening services aren't necessarily permanent.
It's no coincidence that the rise in popularity of URL shorteners closely mirrors the rise in popularity of Twitter; Twitter's 140 character limit is the special ingredient that makes Twitter so compelling, but it's also what made short URLs valuable. Some of you will say that short URLs are useful for other reasons - for example, in print. True, but Twitter is by far the place they are used most.
So, with a 140 character limit, how could Twitter eliminate URL shorteners? Well, first, let's look at the reason for the 140 character limit in the first place. It was chosen because Twitter expected SMS messages to be the primary way that users would interact with the service. While there are many users using it that way, their numbers are far eclipsed by the number of users using Twitter on its native web site, or using one of the plentiful Twitter client apps that are available for both desktop computers and mobile phones.
See, here's the thing: the 140 character limit is effectively arbitrary at this point. It was chosen out of convenience (to support SMS), and it turned out to be a magic number that allowed meaningful but necessarily short messages to be composed on the service. Now, I'm not arguing to extend the number of characters Twitter uses - that would undermine Twitter's entire identity. Instead, what I'm suggesting is that characters in a URL should not count against Twitter's 140 character limit. This would completely negate the need for URL shorteners, and would have the positive effect of letting the service's users actually see the URLs that they are clicking on.
Okay, wait a minute, you say -- what about the SMS users? We can't forget about them; they can't handle more than 140 character messages! You're right. And we're not forgetting about them. I propose that Twitter simply intercept URLs that are longer than 22 characters when sending SMS messages and replace them with a placeholder like [reply "URL" for link]. Since the placeholder is 22 characters long, this limits the length a URL could use up, but still gives the SMS user the ability to retrieve a URL if they want to. In fact, this should be a setting that would allow the SMS user to shorten it to simply [URL], and the service would intercept all URLs.
Not counting URLs maintains the spirit of Twitter's character limit, while eliminating Twitter's reliance on 3rd party web-cluttering URL shortening services. But what do you think: should the 140 characters apply to everything including URLs, or just actual human-readable content?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
chefgon_ign said 5:18PM on 9-13-2009
Maybe a workaround would be to allow any 140 character tweet to have an attached URL, separate from the message. Then you could just have it display underneath the actual tweet.
I don't think anything needs to happen to keep SMS users in the loop, since all phone carriers allow longer messages to be received at the cost of two messages instead of one, but anybody using SMS for twitter has an unlimited message plan anyway. If you're paying fifteen cents every time one of your friends posts a tweet, then you're already used to getting ripped off so what difference would it make?
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Henry said 5:42PM on 9-13-2009
What about this issue, I could have an entire tweet that is, "http://www.Ithinkthattwittershouldletpeoplehavetweetsthatarelongerthan140charactersbecausepeoplecanjustexploittheURLlengthpermissiontogettheirpointacrossanyway.com"
This would force twitter to either stop the URL length flexibility or validate all URLs that are entered, which is probably not something they would like to do.
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notatoad said 5:44PM on 9-13-2009
heh. we think alike.
sRc said 7:38PM on 9-13-2009
well, aside from the fact that a domain name's length is limited to 63 characters
Henry said 9:44PM on 9-13-2009
Fair point, but I'm sure we both see how that could be worked around.
Tia said 9:58PM on 9-13-2009
The thing you're missing, though, is that Twitter doesn't care how long your tweet is except that it's too long for an SMS subscriber to recieve in one text. So if they decided to impliment the author's suggestion, they still wouldn't care if you decided to put a long, long tweet into a fake URL. Your followers might be peeved, but then it's up to them to stop following you or decide it's not worth worrying about.
Like Jason said, 140 characters is essential arbitrary at this point because most users DO NOT interact with Twitter using SMS.
notatoad said 5:42PM on 9-13-2009
it's a good idea, but it could be abused by people putting text in areas of the URL that get discarded. www.google.com/#it-wouldn't-be-very-readable-but-all-this-text-could-potentially-be-not-counted-toward-my-140-char-limit-if-twitter-were-to-implement-this.
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Jasmine said 6:14PM on 9-13-2009
I like this idea, but in addition to the above concerns, there's still one more thing: How would twitter handle a tweet that has multiple links?
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Aalaap Ghag said 12:11AM on 9-14-2009
For multiple links, LinkBunch could be used, just the way Twitter currently uses Bitly.
SDreamer said 7:39PM on 9-13-2009
Maybe they can just cound the main web address's characters. I don't know if this is possible, but if they can reformat addresses on the fly. So if you paste in http://www.mywebsite.com/twittersideaofbeingwaytoolongofanadressforthem, it would be shortened to 'mywebsite.com/twitterside.....' or something similar, and just cound the characters "mywebsite' since all addresses usually have 'http://www.' and some sort of suffix .com,.net,.au, etc etc. That to me would solve uberly long addresses as provided as examples, but also show where the address points to at least to some extent.
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engadet said 9:42PM on 9-13-2009
The 140 character limit is 100% arbitrary. SMS are only limited to 160 chars when you use basic latin characters - if you use extended latin or unicode that drops quickly (unicode is 74 chars IIRC). Twitter will gladly send out 140 characters of Japanese text, and split it into multiple SMS.
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jamesbrown said 1:30AM on 9-14-2009
i am not sure but the links may be counted as it gets traffic to your site.
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developar said 1:31AM on 9-14-2009
I would like to say it is annoying to see long links in tweets, so shortening then is not only for the sake of 140 characters.
Anyway I am using www.untiny.com whenever I suspect some short links :)
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Saint Seminole said 11:55AM on 9-14-2009
I solved this entirely by not using Twitter at all. I know, that's beside the point, but I can "Tweet" with as many characters as I want on my blog, and anyone can read it, comment on it, "follow" me, etc.
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Paul OFlaherty said 5:12PM on 9-14-2009
There are other solutions. The first being to run your own persoanl URL shortner service so if your site goes dead, so does your url shortner and it's no major lost to the web's link structure.
The second is to have all the URL shortners sign up with something like 301works.org which will hopefully maintain the links even if the service dies.
But as for not counting URL characters at the expense of mobile users... That's just wrong. When twitter sent updates to mobile numbers in Ireland I was an avid user, despite the cost of texting England (closest twitter number) to update. Making users pay to retrieve a URL is an unfair and inelegant solution.
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PC-VIP said 12:34PM on 9-15-2009
The problem is exacerbated by Twitter's arbitrary use of bit.ly. Sometimes URL-laden tweets get shorted in real time by Twitter, and sometimes they are left intact; even when the 140-character limit is not being encroached upon!
This will resolve itself soon, as Twitter grows up.
Jeff Yablon
President & CEO
Virtual VIP / Answer Guy Computer Care, Business Coaching and Virtual Assistant Services
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twatter said 4:07AM on 10-11-2009
why doesn't Twitter have their own URL shortening service?
maybe they can buy the land of Turkey and create: http://tw.tr
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