This is quite an interesting idea, Twitter is testing its own shortening service @ http://t.co
They are concerned about the phishing attacks that took place in February 2010, and they want to check the links and wrap your links with say something like this http://t.co/Dt43G.
Now I am not a idiot and understand what they are concerned about, but I have a couple of thoughts.
1. If you see a shortened link like http://t.co/Dt43G or http://bit.ly/cnrMSH, do you stop and think “hey this might be a phishing attack?” well if you do, I am sure that you are in the minority. This means that if you see the http://t.co service being used will you then go, well that is perfectly safe?
2. There are many shortening services out there, some good and some really bad. http://bit.ly, http://tinyurl.com etc Tiny Url has over 600 million links and bit.ly has become so popular that it is almost synonymous with shortening links. (I personally find Tiny Url quite slow in South Africa compared to bit.ly but any way.) On Twitter I often find the Fail Whale when just trying to look at my tweets let alone post anything, will they have to come up with a new logo when the shortening service stops working or is overloaded?
3. Are we putting all our eggs into the Twitter Basket? It would be quite interesting to see how bit.ly and others are going to receive this news, will they approach the EU and complain? I would if my entire business was going to be changed by one move by Twitter. I understand that they would be wrapping your short link in a Twitter short link, but if the entire of Twitter had shortened links that looked like http://t.co/r5Thf would that look remove the brand of bit.ly?
4. We own our own url shortening service http://urls.co.za which is getting a couple of hits and I enjoy seeing people retweeting our Twitter posts with our shortened link in. I like looking at the stats and the places that our shortening service is being used. This small joy will be removed from me and I wouldn’t post links from our shortening service to Twitter, I would then just use bit.ly.
5. With the demise of tr.im the other day, it became quite apparent that links in tweets don’t die if they were tweeted yesterday and can be used for years. If this move by Twitter forces bit.ly and others to shut down, what will happen to all those links, is Twitter going to index them all and replace them on Twitter? I don’t think so.
Thanks for dealing with my rants, I am sure I have missed other very important points, but that is all I can think of now.
Article can be found here : http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20007165-93.html
