Thursday, August 20, 2009

Twitter URL shortening by convention

To date all the fuss over the various URL shortening services has been about how to get the shortest URL after "http://", but what about shortening that part? We could apply some convention over configuration and declare that a single / was sufficient to decorate a link in a tweet. This would work exactly the same way that # for hash tag links and @ for username links work currently. Instead of http://bit.ly/xxxx or http://tinyurl.com/xxxx, lets just all start using /bit.ly/xxxx and /tinyurl.com/xxxx!

Once a few of the major Twitter apps start recognizing this convention, it will really work great!