What is the status of URL shortening by Twitter? (no more bit.ly)?

[Bjoern]

Hi,

I just wanted to look into the URL shortening issues, but found that I
could not get Twitter to shorten my URLs anymore. Has Twitter dropped
the practice of using bit.ly?

I am very interested in the reverse lookup - finding tweets that link
to a given web site. I think it would have been next to impossible to
do with bit.ly anyway, so if Twitter dropped it again, cheers to that!
At least with tinyurl there was a high likelyhood that all tinyurls
pointing to a given web site would be the same. As far as I can tell
bit.ly does not even give you the option to create a "common" URL via
the API - all URLs would be specific to the API caller.

It would be great if eventually Twitter could support searching for
URLs (and finding all of it's variants), similar to the recently
announced TweetMeme API. The TweetMeme API is interesting, but too
(rate) limited - also missing JSONP. Besides, it would really make
sense if Twitter would support this directly.

Björn

[Matt Sanford]

Hi there,

Twitter disabled the automatic URL shortening if there is any
slowness or other problem accessing the shortener. We make a best
effort to automatically shorten but we don't want to return HTTP 500
simply because a shortening service failed to respond in time. As far
as bit.ly goes, they do have an API [1] for getting all of the short
versions of a long URL, so you might want to give that a shot. We've
talked many times about the shortened/lengthened URL issue in search
and hopefully we'll come up with a scalable solution at some point.
It's not something I expect in the near term, however.

Thanks;
– Matt Sanford / @mzsanford
Twitter Dev

[1] - http://bit.ly/apidocs

[Stuart]

2009/6/18 Bjoern <bjoe...@googlemail.com>:

> It would be great if eventually Twitter could support searching for
> URLs (and finding all of it's variants), similar to the recently
> announced TweetMeme API. The TweetMeme API is interesting, but too
> (rate) limited - also missing JSONP. Besides, it would really make
> sense if Twitter would support this directly.

If you have a reasonable use case Tweetmeme will be happy to whitelist
you. Send a request to @tweetmemedev for more info.

-Stuart

--
http://stut.net/projects/twitter

[Bjoern]

On Jun 18, 5:08 pm, Stuart <stut...@gmail.com> wrote:

> If you have a reasonable use case Tweetmeme will be happy to whitelist
> you. Send a request to @tweetmemedev for more info.

Thanks, will do once my project is a bit further down the road. What
tweetmeme offers is definitely what I wuld be looking for.

Björn

[Bjoern]

My reply yesterday got swallowed by Google it seems...

On Jun 18, 4:58 pm, Matt Sanford <m...@twitter.com> wrote:
>      Twitter disabled the automatic URL shortening if there is any  
> slowness or other problem accessing the shortener.

Thanks for the clarification!

> simply because a shortening service failed to respond in time. As far  
> as bit.ly goes, they do have an API [1] for getting all of the short  
> versions of a long URL, so you might want to give that a shot. We've  

I don't think they do - even on the bit.ly development group they said
that they don't. Which API call would return the variants? It is odd
because on the web site of bit.ly it is possible to see the variants.
But they confirmed to me that they don't provide it through the API
(yet). That was a couple of weeks ago, but I still can't see an API
call that would do it.
They seem to return all users who have shortened an URL, but since
there is no way to retrieve the user-specific variant of an URL, it
does not help much.

Björn

[markanson]

I have implemented a convention through which geolocation and
"industry" information can be encoded in a shortened url

Say you have a link in this format: http://nowww.us/~auNSaJ7ue

The last part of this web link ~auNSaJ7ue when decoded says this is a
job in the Australia (au). In the state of NS (New South Wales). An
alternative way of encoding would contain the zip or post code instead
of NS so it would be ~us95064jJ63a4 indicating that this is a job at
Santa Cruz University in California. The next character, a small j,
says this is a job, a job in the IT industry (J) using the ANZSIC
industry classification system and our site Nowww's home-grown
convention of using "j" for jobs, "n" for news, "s" for sport, "a" for
adult content etc. The final four characters in a link such as
~usNYjJ63a4 are an encoded base64 number - the actual job ID value
listed in a database.

see
http://nowww.us/about_us.php for more about this