I've wondered for a long time why we really need URL shorteners. Sometimes there are really long URL's full of query strings (I'm looking at you, Amazon.com) that are prime candidates for a friendly bit.ly address. Another great use for a short url is inside of a tweet. Twitter's 140 character limit is a double-edged sword, making it difficult to embed long addresses while being the whole basis and appeal of Twitter's micro-blogging nature.
URL shortening systems are also a double edged sword, but many agree (including myself) that they are a necessary evil. I'm convinced, however, that they don't need to be necessary at all with Twitter.
Thinking about URLs
Since the dawn of the web browser and the HTML language, we've had the <a/> tag. Excuse me for being obvious, but with the <a/> tag you can take any url and give it a string of text to represent that url. For example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google could be represented in a webpage as Wikipedia for Google. We don't want HTML in our tweets, so how can we get this functionality inside of Twitter?
There are a number of ways to create markup for the web without using HTML. For example, I write my posts on Whalesalad using the markdown language, which is rendered into HTML by Django when you load a page. In markdown, you can write URL's a number of ways, the most popular being: [Google](http://google.com).
The Solution
Twitter should provide a simple markdown or textile-esque language for writing URL's inside of tweets. One of the things that this prevents is the unnecessary redirection that URL shorteners provide. They're even worse when they go down (me, yurechko). Another downside to URL shorteners is the obfuscation of URL's; How do I know what I am about to visit is something I am interested in visiting? By storing the URL inside of a markdown-style syntax, the URL can be displayed by clients inside of a bubble on hover (on the website) or a variety of ways inside of clients like Tweetie and Twidroid.
This solution is 100% backwards compatible with the current way that Twitter stores url's (as plaintext). It does introduce a handful of potential downsides, however, like larger database columns (a URL can technically be up to 255 characters long).
I'm surprised Twitter hasn't come up with such a solution to this problem. Maybe they like creating the opportunities for other companies to create products and services that rely on Twitter? I'd love to hear more from you guys on how you feel about this. Of course, follow me on Twitter to keep up with my site (or add the RSS feed).
