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.