Today, on Twitter, I saw a tweet by one of my colleagues at my internship at e-sites. It was about an April fools day joke by Heikenen®. (If you don’t get it, don’t worry – its a bad joke anyway.)
In the tweet, my colleague linked to the website. And as all links on Twitter, it got shortened. (I beleave Twitter does this automatically these days – I’m not sure as I don’t use Twitter myself.) Now, in the (rather crazy) world where messages can only be 140 characters long, I understand the need to shorten URL’s – if you can only use 140 characters, you don’t want to waste 64 on a URL like the URL of this post. 20 characters seems much better right.
But if you’re living in that crasy world, the 17 of http://bierpad.nl is better then to 20 of http://bit.ly/do4hsF right?
Now, I’m not saying everybody should be counting how long a URL is before they shorten it. But it wouldn’t be that hard to make those shortening services do that same counting for you, right?
You would think so.
However, sometimes the point of the shortened URL is also that people don’t know for sure where they are clicking to. *whistles*