And here I thought just showing the toolbar and hijacking the URL was a scammy move... This has now become a textbook case of what is wrong with URL shorteners. Your links are at someone else's mercy. Even "reputable" firms like Digg can abuse your trust (I guess the investor's are leaning on them big time these days).
Luckily this is easy to fix going forward: before sharing a link make sure it isn't using Digg's domain. If it is, resolve it and send the original. Rinse, repeat.
You'll have to visit the link and copy the URL in the linked headline of the resulting Digg story. That's better than making people you send the link to have to jump through the same hoop.
Sometimes in a startup, people can get crazy. I love having a level head on the team. I mean, it takes passion and exhuberance and a little bit of crazy to make it all work, but you don't want to go over the edge.
It's all kind of coming into a fever pitch. It seems like the internet is losing the people who understand what makes sense. I think it's gotten to the point that the ad based models and the social networking and the big investments with no revenue are going to start scrambling to stay alive and we are going to see a lot more decisions that, from the outside, seem ridiculous.
From the inside though, there are few options and these companies are going to have to go with something.
The eternal september is a constant search for a new january.
There's no rule that says we should use the same vapid title here. I yearn for the day when I come to HN and find that either the submitters or the editors have decided to spoil every teaser and ReMove Those Damned Flow Impeding Capitals.
From "Why Japan’s Cellphones Haven’t Gone Global" to "Hardware bulk prevents Japanese cellphone globalization". Throw on a subtitle! Don't worry, I know where to find the actual article title. Sure, don't change titles to something weird and unrecognizable, but half the time I have no idea what I'm in for. Spoil it for me, summarize the whole damn thing in the title if you can.
I don't have a problem with this thread's title, but I have noticed that a non-negligible number of HN titles of late have been poorly chosen (i.e. fail to convey the gist of what is being linked to).
I'll admit it: I come to the comments section first on every story I visit; I saw his comment and agreed. I didn't realize when I upvoted it that the linked story had the "Confirmed:" in the headline, or I wouldn't have upvoted it.
Apparently Kevin Rose knew about this, contrary to what he tweeted. From a TC comment referring to Leo Laporte interviewing Rose on TWIT:
Leo Laporte had Digg co-founder Kevin Rose on his show and asked him about this. You can see it on Twit Live – the Diggbar discussion starts at the 11:26 mark. Here is an excerpt:
* (Laporte gives Rose the background from an article on Techcrunch)
* Laporte: Is that true?
* Rose: That’s a good question.
* Laporte: You don’t know?
* Rose: I’ve been gone for 2 weeks so I don’t know what got pushed, what code got pushed and how it functions but my last understanding is that what we wanted to do is have it so that if you click on a Digg URL it takes you to the Digg stories so you can Digg it. Rather than providing a short URL service that just forwards and does redirection we would just do a URL service just for Digg articles. Just like the same way that Techcrunch does “techcrunch slash 85374″ – if you go to that you’re not going to go to some other site you’re going to go to techcrunch. That’s the story.
* Laporte: So you’re backing off on the original idea which is a general URL shortening service…
This is a prime example of the pitfalls of shortened URLs. Short URLs are pointers -- don't rely on them to point to the same thing (or a valid thing) forever.
So the question has to be asked, what does twitter get from a "vibrant" marketplace of url shorteners? Digg is only the first to try and use the links to their advantage. These other services are going to need to pay the bills, and we'll start seeing more and more of these stories.
They've got the capital, twitter either needs to buy a url shortener, or at least play kingmaker and push one service.
They should just fold the functionality into their API. Add an optional URL field to each tweet, and then within the message the URL can be referenced using Markdown like syntax: [link body][1]. Only the link body text would count against your character count, so you get a free URL.
They could even sell the click-through analytics to their large customers.
URL shorteners are a hack, there's no reason to encourage them any further.
Twitter should just obviate the need for URL shorteners, and make URLs take up only a certain number of characters for the tweet. Then, display them through HTML with ellipsis or something, but keep the HREF pointing to the real thing.
Why would they have to buy one? It's an incredibly simple thing to create. It would take more work to buy one and integrate it into their system/API than just create it from scratch.
Let me guess... it would only take about a weekend, right?
All snark aside, putting together something as rich as bit.ly is NOT an incredibly simple thing to create. And twitter will need to incorporate such functionality in there, or people WILL find ways to use their favourites to get the functionality they're used to.
"Let me guess... it would only take about a weekend, right?"
Making a functional link redirector? Yes, absolutely. There are frameworks that you could toss something together with in an hour that would scale enough for most people's purposes. With some frameworks you can get pretty close to true internet-scale scalability in a weekend. (I'd think Yaws and Erlang here.) I've seen framework tutorials use this as the demo, and, again, we're talking things that can get awfully close to internet scale without much work.
Making all the stuff that apparently surround link redirectors in some desperate attempt to make it "monetizable"? It would take longer, but unlike the case for "replicating Stack Overflow" where all the extra stuff is the real value and will take more than a weekend, that's all extra stuff that nobody really cares about very much in this case. A page that takes a URL, returns a URL, and does nothing else really is enough for the vast majority of uses.
It's a different class of problem. This truly is a fundamentally trivial problem. I personally see no reasonable way to "monetize" this trivial service, because the market value of a URL synonym is going to trend very strongly towards zero due to effectively infinite supply.
(Much as your point was that it's hard to recreate bit.ly rather than the weekend snark, note my point is more that doing that is a waste of time, mostly-crap features done to benefit the redirector, not the user, and that this truly is easy to recreate enough to drive supply sky-high.)
Most people will just use the default. TinyURL used to be the default, now it's Bit.ly. If they made a basic (TinyURL style) shortener it would be more popular than Bit.ly over night.
The way they have done the default has always bugged me--they don't shorten URLs as you type them so if you're over 140 characters it won't shorten, but if your message is under 140 characters it sometimes (only sometimes) shortens the URL. Which is unnecessary and annoying, if the space is there why not show the full URL?
This is a really bad decision from digg. I suspect that people will start moving away from Digg as a url shortening service now. The diggbar was bad enough encapsulating the content in a frame.
Agreed, although I think an even better solution is to not use URL shorteners at all. It could just as easily be one of the others that does something stupid next time.
So digg.com is not a typical url shortener anymore. So what? I've never used it that way.
Now if you see a digg.com link it will take you to digg. You know what you get. Use it that way or don't.
Luckily this is easy to fix going forward: before sharing a link make sure it isn't using Digg's domain. If it is, resolve it and send the original. Rinse, repeat.