rev canonical and escalation of commitment

A solution to url shortening is going around the web now. The plan is to use rev=”canonical” to show the shortened url for the resource you’re using.

I think we might have lost track of the problem. The problem is that twitter limits your posts to 140 characters. Twitter does this because it started mainly as an SMS system, a stupid protocol that the mobile carriers thought up to make money overloading their already existing control channels. I don’t know what the break down in their traffic is, but I think we can safely assume most users don’t use SMS now. I just loaded the public timeline repeatedly to get a sample of 100 tweets, and none used SMS.

Twitter counts absolute characters also, so for example a tweet can’t do something like:

Hey, i love google!

And get a count of 19, they have to say:

Hey, i love http://google.com

And get 29. This is because, again they are sending to phones, and most SMS clients are stupid and can’t handle links at all. (which is usually smart since they don’t have much room to work with anyway)

To get around this problem, people turned to url shorteners. It took people a while to realize this was a terrible idea. urls should mean something, people like knowing where they are going, it destroys the link structure of the web, it relies on a company to exist and creates a single point of failure, and any number of other terrible things.

So the solution is rev="canonical", where I would say, for this page maybe

<link rev="canonical" href="http://sleepyhead.org/canonical" />

First, the philosophical problems. I like my actual url. It all means something, why change it? If the problem is that twitter can’t send links with it to mobile phone, so be it. The phones that people are using to read them via SMS probably don’t have a browser anyway, so who cares? Some people might say, oh but the 140 character limit is good for other reasons! It forces brevity. Great, count the displayed characters then, and let people put links like normal. No one complains that links are too long in html, because they are hidden. Since 99% of the platforms people use twitter on are fully capable of rendering html, use it.

For the real problems.

• http://sleepyhead.org/canonical is way too long. People use bit.ly more than tinyurl because bit.ly is shorter. If my short url isn’t as short as one you are going to use from a shortener, you won’t use it.
• twitter and services like that would have to ping the site to see if it has a short url, and then change the tweets that use the “wrong” short url? never happen

The real solution is to get twitter to:

• count the displayed characters
• allow people to add links like normal
• if someone pastes in a url, and it goes over 140, make it an embedded link on the word “link” or something
• don’t worry about sending links to phones via sms, the only phones that can handle this at all have twitter clients anyway.

I’m not really worried mind you, this has about as much chance of happening as most fancy link voting type schemes. (most of which I actually really like! haha) Which is to say, none.