URL auto obfuscating
I have an issue with TweetDeck. It’s not only tweetdeck that does this, but being a popular app it’s the most visible to me.
It just shortened “http://daytee.com/1f9” to “http://bit.ly/4h5OXK” without asking.
So it shortened a 14 character URL to a 13 character URL when there was plenty space left in the 140.
In shortening that URL readers lose a LOT.
Any meaning in the url itself is lost, as you can’t see where it’s going. You can no longer easily search for the URL in twitter to see who else tweeted it – a good way to gauge popularity of something.
The site owner also loses a lot.
Link love is diluted. Domain recognition cannot be built. And any site which tracks mentions of specific links to help rank content (like daytee) have to work a lot harder to do so.
When I set up daytee.com I picked the domain specifically to be short, and wrote a url shortener for all content so that all shared links for the first year or two of the sites operation would be just 14 characters long. This was specifically to avoid the url shorteners.
I could have gone further, but wanted to keep a .com domain. “dayt.ee” is 3 characters shorter than “daytee.com” but costs more, looks less like a domain to most people, and so is less memorable. Also, it doesn’t feel like a hoop I should have to jump through just to have a link shared in a legible manner.
I’m sure there are excellent reasons for a twitter client to want to send traffic through a bit.ly link to gather stats and build a better understanding of usage patterns. Owning the link in this way should be a side issue, not the objective, of link shortening.
Turning a legible 14 character link into an illegible 13 character link isn’t convenient link shortening – it’s link obfuscation.