Links & Twitter Length shouldn't matter

[Dan Hutter]

I'm surprised no one has posted this here yet. :D

When this is rolled out more broadly to users this summer, all links shared on Twitter.com or third-party apps will be wrapped with a t.co URL. A really long link such as http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 might be wrapped as http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMS, but it could be displayed to web or application users as amazon.com/Delivering- or as the whole URL or page title. Ultimately, we want to display links in a way that removes the obscurity of shortened link and lets you know where a link will take you.

Source: http://blog.twitter.com/2010/06/links-and-twitter-length-shouldnt.html

So, basically tweets will be reduced to a 120 character limit thereby saving 20 characters for links. Any link over 20 characters will be truncated in such a way that you still know where the link is going.

--
Personally I'm happy to see this. As much as it will cheese off the shortener providers and affiliates cloaking links it's a welcome change. I think shortened links were a step backwards from both a security and usability standpoint. I for one cringe every time I click on a shortened URL.

 

[Brandon]

I was going to post this the other day, then I got busy and sidetracked.
It doesn't really matter to me one way or another. I've been using bit.ly for a while now and it seems to work just fine.

 

[Dan Hutter]

My online issue with bit.ly and other URL shortners is you don't know where your actually going unless your running a browser addon. If they had a landing page that showed the target URL by default I wouldn't mind even if it took me an extra second to click through.

Short links are IMHO a bad idea from a security standpoint. Affiliates hiding links isn't really hurting anyone so I'm not going to complain much about that. :D