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.

Daytee

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.

Finally got time to finish The End of Mr Y.

Interesting tale of homeopathic time travel with some disturbing lab mice based stuff. Nicely meta. Read it.

Rubbish ending though. Stop reading at page 490 and make something up instead – sorry Scarlett (oh, and your website seems to be a bit goosed – keeps pointing to www2. which doesn’t know what to do with the php).

Following the bye bye to the last book I’m now hunting for something else to read with a similar opening farewell in the title. Some hopes!

Mark Thomas should be on TV more – waving placards at people dressed in a panda suit. But he’s not, he’s doing an interesting show and he’s podcasting it in a really interesting way – using chunks of interviews from the show. If you don’t understand the credit crunch listen to this.
Oh – and MT is the only comedian to have been mentioned in my rambling wedding speech “.. oh no I’m going all mark thomas…”.

No – not that kind – this kind:

Note the sophisticated use of the carrot as foodstuff rather than nose, thereby subverting the language of the snowman. I also used bioethanol for the eyes instead of coal to reduce the carbon footprint of the shortlived snowbunny – but they don’t show up too well.

Went to bed on monday night – it was snowing – woke up to today telling me the world was in snowbound chaos. But no snow outside. It was raining.

Went to bed last night – it was raining – woke up to today telling me snow Armageddon had paused for a bit. Looked outside and…

I finished two books in a week! Admittedly I started both of them last year – but hey! Bye Bye Balham by Richard Herring – perfect for slicey reading. Slicey as in a page or two at a time when you get a minute rather than a few sittings of a few hours which a ‘proper’ book deserves. Like the books Clarkson releases with his articles. Or Charlie Brooker. But from a blog not a column. Self contained little time wasters – but good. Mostly.
Weirdly I bought it more as a nod for the podcast he does with Andrew ‘Kermode must be on holidays’ Collins.

I finished bad science at last. Wish I’d saved the chapter on the evil Gillian McKeith rather than reading it first. I hope he writes a sequel entirely devoted to a second by second breakdown of her ‘fact’ filled TV appearances. I do like a bit of harmless demonisation. He debunks ‘coffee is evil’ scare stories on http://www.badscience.net so I like him.

I just got my copies of Mustard – the new(ish) comedy magazine. A lot funnier than I expected. Although they better not keep using the phrase ‘post-spaced’ in interviews. Less than £5 for 3 issues.