Twitter the Twit – When short URLs are longer

Twitter is being a bit of a twit. I was tweeting a link to a very short domain and Twitter thought it would be a good idea to use its automatic URL shortener which in fact produced a longer URL! How dumb is that?

I typed in http://owl.uk which is 13 characters and Twitter replaced it with http://t.co/jLQcgAzbqX which is 22 characters. That’s 9 characters longer. What a waste when you’re only give 140 chars in a message.

The problem occurs in Twitter’s web client and also TweetDeck and I imagine most tweeting apps that don’t do a simple sanity check asking itself “is the URL the user types in shorter than the URL I can replace it with?”

I tried to contact Twitter to point this out to them but there’s no obvious contact information on their website. I was going a little crazy searching.

Twitter drives me cuckoo

I had deliberately avoided using Twitter because I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to micro-blog every mundane thought or action, and even more so why would anyone want to be bombarded by other people’s mundane thoughts?

You’ve got to get your hands dirty to fully understand some things in life so I rolled up my sleeves and set up a Twitter account and installed what looks like one of the best Twitter desktop clients, TweetDeck, which uses Adobe AIR.

I became a follower of about 15 people, quite a lot  I thought at the time, until I saw that others were following 100’s of people. Only 3 of my 12 regularly tweeted, sometimes several tweets each per hour. Where do these people get the time from to stop what they’re doing and compose a 140 character thought to share with others? Perhaps they were unemployed or had a very dull office job. Not at all, they’re very busy people working in the IT world, yet they have developed a mental condition that I couldn’t fathom which had become a compulsion to tweet about what they’re doing right now, what they think about something, or where they’re about to go. (Guys, if you’re reading this then I apologise, but at least your flames will be restricted to 140 characters!!! Ha-ha-ha! ;-)

TweetDeck interrupted my train of thought throughout the day alerting me to new tweets. About 1 a day turned out to be interesting, pointing to a URL containing something useful to my job or interesting in my capacity as a concerned citizen.

Celebrities clearly enjoy Twitter as it gives them a platform to perform and to be adored for every waking hour in their life. And fans who live and breath their idol can relish in their activities and musings all day and every day. Stephen Fry is one of the most followed twitterers with nearly half a million people clinging to his occasionally amusing tweets. There was that incident a few months ago where he was stuck in a lift (elevator) and twittered about it from his mobile phone and drew some optimism from his followers who replied to give him support during that very long 30 minute experience, stuck in a confined space with a load of strangers who no doubt started to smell after a short while.

My conclusion is pretty much what I expected before trying Twitter. If you didn’t have a compulsive disorder before using it then you’ll probably develop one after a week. It’s like drilling holes in your life, you’ll leak valuable time during the course of the day achieving very little by twittering or reading every tweet flashed up at you.

I reckon Twitter will be a phase, a fashion lasting a couple of years, or it will mature into something more sensible that can be better controlled or filtered or used in applications for a genuine practical purpose. Speaking of which, there’s a ColdFusion Twitter library that looks very good which gave me an idea of using Twitter in a constructive way for an existing application.