URL Shorteners Make the Web Substantially Slower

blog.watchmouse.com

7 pointsRoridge3 comments

There are few scenarios where url shorteners come in handy... one being Twitter, and the other being times when you get an insanely long and unwieldily querystring moster like earlier when I was sending some directions from Google Maps to a friend. For the former [Twitter], I wrote about what I think could be a simple and effective solution on my blog.

Enjoi - http://whalesalad.com/blog/how-twitter-can-eliminate-url-sho...

TL;DR - Let's use the simple Markdown syntax to let users enter links in their tweets. There are a few downsides (larger columns in the Twitter DB) but Twitter wouldn't need URL shorteners any longer! Plus since they moved to Cassandra... maybe tweet size doesn't really matter anymore :D

I'm not sure I agree they really make things slow as such.

I'm more interested in the 3rd party monitoring aspect of them, how much of my information do they store on the way though exactly.

I agree, a universal markdown syntax would be good... or perhaps just drop "http://

Twitter's length restrictions were originally based on their compatibility with SMS. I imagine this still matters to them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com