Thinking about URLs
I’ve been thinking about URLs recently. A thrilling topic, for sure.
Specifically, I’ve been thinking about URLs on Twitter and why we still have to preface them with “http://” to create an active, “clickable” link. With space at such a premium, why do we have to waste these 7 characters? Can’t they just assume http unless otherwise stated?
Barring any changes to the Twitter API, the recognition and reconstruction of abbreviated URLs will have to be implemented separately by Twitter.com, the big clients (Twhirl, Twitterific, etc.) and anywhere else that Twitter posts are displayed. This could lead to discrepancies between how each site/service handles abbreviated URLs. Perhaps they’ve shied away from this idea because of complications from new top level domain classifications (.us, .ly, etc.). However, accurately identifying abbreviated URLs in the post string is a fairly basic programming task. I, for one, would like to see Twhirl (my Twitter client of choice) interpret URLs this way, and I bet others would too.
After all, we’ve learned to be a lot more efficient when choosing our words for the content of a post. Shouldn’t we do the same when sending out a URL?