[liberationtech] Stanford Bitly Enterprise Account

[Jan Schaumann]

Nick Daly <nick.m.daly at gmail.com> wrote:
> Best I can tell, the only reason they're popular is because
> microblogging sites count links against your 140-character limit.
> 
> Now, if only Twitter[0] used footnotes[1] and didn't count the URL
> against the message, they'd disappear.

All links in Twitter are automatically wrapped in their own link
shortener[0] and thus of a fixed size[1] as far as the 140 char limit goes.
(This has the funny side-effect that sometimes you have a link that gets
_longer_ when wrapped by t.co.)

This was introduced a while ago[2], but is now the case everywhere.

I don't know if other microblogging sites use similar mandatory link
wrapping, but I always understood one of the primary benefits to be
central collection of statistics (which is why bit.ly is so popular, I
believe).

-Jan

Foonotes!

[0] t.co
[1] 20 chars for HTTP, 21 for HTTPS;
    https://dev.twitter.com/docs/tco-link-wrapper/faq#How_long_are_t.co_links
[2] http://blog.twitter.com/2010/06/links-and-twitter-length-shouldnt.html