Twitter didn't tinyurl my tweets tonight

[bcballard]

I use the Twitter API to post article titles followed by a link to the
article, and sometimes a repeat of the domain name if I think Twitter
is going to tinyurl me. Generaly Twitter converts URLs with characters
it doesn't like [^A-Za-z0-9.:/], or URLs in tweets that are too long,
to tinyurls.

However, this evening, none of the URLs I posted were converted to
tinyurls. Not even the ones with characters Twitter doesn't like, and
not the one that was too long.

Here are the status updates I expected to be tinyurled, followed by a
link to the individual tweet as it appeared on Twitter.

The first 3 contain bad characters (underscores or commas), but are
fewer than 140 chars:

GA approves more charter schools
http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/stories/2009/04/01/georgia_charter_school.html
(ajc.com)

http://twitter.com/GeorgiaLogCabin/status/1436345350


Obama's tax pledge up in smoke http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090401/ap_on_go_pr_wh/obama_tax_promise
(news.yahoo.com)

http://twitter.com/GeorgiaLogCabin/status/1436192094


Sweden recognizes marriage equality
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25277939-12335,00.html
(theaustralian.news.com.au)

http://twitter.com/GeorgiaLogCabin/status/1436147039


This one has bad characters (dashes) and is longer than 140 chars:

Obama wants anti-gay advisor
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/god-and-country/2009/03/31/exclusive-former-nfl-coach-tony-dungy-invited-to-join-white-house-faith-council.html
(usnews.com)

http://twitter.com/GeorgiaLogCabin/status/1436319188


That last one shows on http://twitter.com/GeorgiaLogCabin with a
truncated URL that causes it to link to a broken story. However, on
the individual Tweet link above, the URL is not truncated and works
fine...

So I have one main question with a few possible answers:

Q: What happened to Twitter's auto-tinyurl convert?

Possible answers?

A1: Tinyurl just happened to be down during the time I was posting
updates, so Twitter couldn't request tinyurls and used my long ones
(though other people's tweets before, during and after mine appear to
be tinyurled as normal.)

A2: Twitter just this evening stopped tinyurl-ing my tweets, but not
anybody else's (at least not anyone I happen to follow.)

A3: Some Twitter bug nobody's aware of (I searched the FAQs, this
message board, and via Google and didn't find anyone else with this
particular issue.)

A4: Some other reason?

Any ideas?

[Pavlo Zahozhenko]

Twitter never tinyurls my links from API, tinyurls them only from web interface. Sometimes I even use it as a 'feature' - post link from API if I don't want it to be auto-tinyurled!

[Alex Payne]

TinyURL was running quite slow, so we temporarily disabled our
automatic shortening of long URLs.

We're currently working on a project to make the shortening of URLs
more consistent and predictable. We know it's currently kind of a
guessing game as to what will be shortened, and we want to fix that.

--
Alex Payne - API Lead, Twitter, Inc.
http://twitter.com/al3x

[bcballard]

Thanks for the info Alex. I think Tinyurling is fine, but
documentation would help. I found some info on old posts on this
group, but would have never figured out what was tinyurled on my own.
Perhaps a FAQ would be sufficient to explain what get's shortened.

My main concern is that I want my readers to know where they will end
up if they click a tinyurl, so my script repeat just the domain name
for any URL it thinks is going to be shortened.

[Sotos]

Many of my URLs are now broken because of this issue. Is it going to
be fixed any time soon or should I shorten my URLs myself before
sending them to Twitter from now on?

On Apr 2, 8:45 pm, Alex Payne <a...@twitter.com> wrote:
> TinyURL was running quite slow, so we temporarily disabled our
> automatic shortening of long URLs.
>
> We're currently working on a project to make the shortening of URLs
> more consistent and predictable. We know it's currently kind of a
> guessing game as to what will be shortened, and we want to fix that.
>
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 22:20, bcballard <bcball...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I use the Twitter API to post article titles followed by a link to the
> > article, and sometimes a repeat of the domain name if I think Twitter
> > is going to tinyurl me. Generaly Twitter converts URLs with characters
> > it doesn't like [^A-Za-z0-9.:/], or URLs in tweets that are too long,
> > to tinyurls.
>
> > However, this evening, none of the URLs I posted were converted to
> > tinyurls. Not even the ones with characters Twitter doesn't like, and
> > not the one that was too long.
>
> > Here are the status updates I expected to be tinyurled, followed by a
> > link to the individual tweet as it appeared on Twitter.
>
> > The first 3 contain bad characters (underscores or commas), but are
> > fewer than 140 chars:
>
> > GA approves more charter schools

> >http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/stories/2009/04/01/georgia_cha...
> > (ajc.com)
>
> >http://twitter.com/GeorgiaLogCabin/status/1436345350
>
> > Obama's tax pledge up in smokehttp://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090401/ap_on_go_pr_wh/obama_tax_promise

> > (news.yahoo.com)
>
> >http://twitter.com/GeorgiaLogCabin/status/1436192094
>
> > Sweden recognizes marriage equality

> >http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25277939-12335,00....

> > (theaustralian.news.com.au)
>
> >http://twitter.com/GeorgiaLogCabin/status/1436147039
>
> > This one has bad characters (dashes) and is longer than 140 chars:
>
> > Obama wants anti-gay advisor

> >http://www.usnews.com/blogs/god-and-country/2009/03/31/exclusive-form...
> > (usnews.com)
>
> >http://twitter.com/GeorgiaLogCabin/status/1436319188
>
> > That last one shows onhttp://twitter.com/GeorgiaLogCabinwith a

[Doug Williams]

This was an abnormal circumstance.

Doug Williams
Twitter API Support
http://twitter.com/dougw

[Peter Denton]

But it doesnt hurt to tiny them beforehand. Then you can guarantee this wont happen and you know the exact char count prior to a post.

in php:

    function tinyURL($u){
             return file_get_contents('http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url='.$u);

--
Peter M. Denton
www.twibs.com
in...@twibs.com

Twibs makes Top 20 apps on Twitter - http://tinyurl.com/bopu6c

[explicious]

I think the thing shouldn't mess with the post anyway, it seems
prudent to preserve the integrity of the original post instead of
manipulating it - snip, snip. If we were here posting novels all day,
I say the desire for automatic machine-abridged versions is arguable.
And I think it goes into the area of making a policy auto-decide which
bits of the 140 characters are deemed "not desirable".

supposititious conceptualization ==> {snip,snip} ==> fake idea

I believe there is a limit to the post text, and if the URL causes the
post to exceed the determined character length, I'm not sure that
shortening it on the inbound makes sense.

--
Waitman

[Chad Etzel]

On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 1:38 PM, explicious <avai...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I believe there is a limit to the post text, and if the URL causes the
> post to exceed the determined character length, I'm not sure that
> shortening it on the inbound makes sense.

Huh? It makes total sense to do this. As far as hyperlinks are
concerned (on normal websites), the actual URL of the link is really
metadata (stored in the href attribute), and the text representing the
link (9 times out of 10) is not the actual URL, but rather something
like "Click Here".

On twitter the metadata and the text representation are the same
(meaning there's no way to change the link text that will appear). So,
twitter is doing a slight favor for us here, and instead of
displaying "Click Here" to save characters, it is just using the
tinyurl URL instead.

Whether tinyurl is the "best" service to use for this purpose is
arguable, and probably off-topic for this thread, but it does save a
lot of characters.

-Chad

[explicious]

hmmm i'm pecking around on my cell phone and send a message '<a
href="http://example.com/">foo</a>' and have example.com shortened?
i'm still stuck on the SMS limit, i think....

[Chad Etzel]

You can't send html in tweets (well, technically you *can* but it is
just treated as normal text). so trying to "linkify" text by wrapping
it in <a></a> tags won't do anything.

-Chad

[explicious]

oh. i suppose i was confused by your example. So I'm not sure why
shortening the URL makes any sense, if 1) I can't send HTML and 2) I
can't send more than 140 to begin with.
from the top of my head, the only thing that makes sense to me
regarding URL shortening done on the receiving end of the message (by
twitter) is to remove all external URL's from posts, a la myspace -
you know, they're going to do you a favor by removing all external
links from their site.

but i'm totally *not* advocating it.

[Ariadne]

Chad Etzel wrote:

> Whether tinyurl is the "best" service to use for this purpose is
> arguable, and probably off-topic for this thread, but it does save a
> lot of characters.
>
> -Chad

I've never thought of not shortening URLs
myself but bit.ly gives a slightly shorter
link than tinyurl and sometimes that matters.

[explicious]

is this issue dead? I've been thinking about it - comments... anyone?

1) "Not" auto-rewriting URLs on input leaves the system susceptible to
various gregarious manipulation. It's currently trivial to get 10,000
visitors a day to click out of twitter and potentially up to 100,000 a
day - fictional scenario: tweeter's rival gang twanker bugs the system
in order to show their flag to tweeter's posse.

BUT,

2) with auto-rewriting URLs on input:

a) ruins applications that operate as "link sites" - or at least
makes them incredibly boring.

b) dings the traffic (potentially big ding) to existing url shorter
apps.

c) provides a mechanism to monitor and control off-site traffic.

d) makes the twitter data far less interesting to outside parsing
apps.



have a great day.

waitman




On Apr 4, 8:58 am, Ariadne <ariadne....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Chad Etzel wrote:
> > Whethertinyurlis the "best" service to use for this purpose is