Short URLs are great, they make sharing blog posts and YouTube videos easy for things like Twitter and old school email programs that love to break URLs into multiple lines causing frustrated users to cut and paste humpty dumpty URLs.  They do however have a lot of down sides.  They may not point where you think they do, and can be easily spammed around and provide for some pretty effective trojan horses.  These tiny locators usually don’t include your own domain name, so trackbacks for blogs, statistics or Google Page Rank don’t work (Although I’m sure Google has a plan in the works for this.)  Many sites implement their own sharing tools that let you save and share links to their site.  Many of the free externally hosted tools use their own URL shortener or own of the major players like bit.ly (recently acquired by Twitter.)  This still adds just more URLs out there that you don’t control.  You can solve this by having your own inhouse service (homegrown or bought using a whitelabel service) that will use yor own domain which will help with your own stats, trackbacksGoogle Page Rank.  But if the visitor of you your site doesn’t know how to easily get this URL they won’t use it.  The most common place to get the URL is of course from the Address Bar and people will cut and paste it or use a plugin to autosubmit the URL to a shortener or to a Twitter service.

I think a solution can lie within the page and camn be consumed by the browser and other services.  For browsers it could work as either a built in feature like the common favicon.ico or via a plugin for now till things catch. When a browser knows that a page has a short URL it could provide an option to copy that or allow for it to be passed easily to other plugins when requested.  When services such as Twitter post a link and wish to shorten it, they can check the page for the existenence of the shorturl and use that over one they would use by default.  This does however mean that the service has to retrieve the page or it’s headers to get this info and then check that the shorturl does in fact meet their length requirements.  The other issue is if the page lies and links to something false.

In thinking about the use of the <link> tag for an in-page solutiuion I came across someone that had a similar idea: <link rel=”shorturl” href=”http://example.com/12345″ />

I don’t know what would suffice as the perfect solution, but I think it can only be solved via the community at large.

Twitter is obviously a huge part of people’s lives, not many of these people, but many.  I for one see it as a great medium for learning news and interacting with my “real world” friends and even finding new ones.  It’s even a great resource for marketing oneself and helping to locate new jobs as well.

Twitter is akin to email where the basis for it is ver simple, it’s a transportaion layer for information.  This information is only limited by 140 characaters.  This still leaves the layer quite open.  The idea of distributing news via Twitter is among the many ways that illustrate the powerful nature of their simple transportation layer.  Riding on top of that layer is RiotFeed which has a few dozen or so Twitter accounts where they aggregate and categorize news on various topics such as Technology, Green Living, and Trends and Culture.  They collect news from other Twitter accounts and the web and put it into a single use news feed.  I do wish they would attribute Twitter resources with the @ sign, but that’s a small gripe.  The concept and the follow through are well done.

Even with Twitter being a single access point, the plethora of clients provide for a personalized way to retrieve the news.  I’m not going to go to Facebook for news, and with a limited number of alternative facebook clients and because of Facebook’s complex user interface you really need to go to the site to get the most of it. This shows where Twitter really shines.

Twitter Trending Topics are a very cool thing and it is interesting to see how information spreads through Twitter.  An example that’s relevant today is the #IranElection.  But if you look at the current results (and since Twitter search is real time you may or may not see it) there are quite a number of ReTweets very often.

So It makes me think about how much is something really a “trend”.  So that means you need to define trend or at least define it for yourself or the twitterverse.  For me I’m more interested in seeing real content that is relevant to me.  So that means true conversations and discussion of a topic.  And a retweet as helpful and nice as they are, are not nessecarily real content when they reach a mass large enough to be a trend.  So I would like to see an option to the Trending Topic search that removes retweeting from the results.

Since retweets are not standard I’m sure it wouldn’t be perfect but I figure that by removing tweet results that start with “RT ” or “retweet ” or ones that have ” via @” near the tail of the tweet could constitute a retweet.  I’m sure there are a few others as odd apps like to come up with their stnadards (like “RT:”)  So another means either in conjunction or by itself is to remove tweets that are 95% similar to other tweets.  If you said the same thing as someone else then that data is not nessecarily as important in most cases.

Now I don’t propose that this option be a default unless it’s perfected but that like I’ve said that it is at least an option to help weed out the results to get decent content.  Since in the end the real reason to search is to find.

I’ve been using TwitterBerry for my BlackBerry Storm, but I don’t quite love it so much as I use more and more desktop and web based apps.  I feel like there are some features that I need, that would make things easier.  So until I have the time to learn the BlackBerry SDK and write my app, I’m going to list out what I think is important and useful.

• Multiple Accounts - (for Corporate and Personal) all tweets from people you follow will be integrated into main list and have capability to have color coding
• Groups - The app will have grouping capabilites (along with automated groupings (such as per account groupings and recent friends etc…) and groups can be accessed by swiping sideways on the list view (also the abiity to hide groups from swiping and only view from group list availble from main menu)
• Tweet Caching - The ability to cache a tweet while you are not able to access a mobile signal
• In-app Flagging - for followup gets added to the “Flagged” automatic Group
• Search tweets of my friends - You know you recall a friend that tweeted about something particular, so search only within those tweets

So this is the start of my “favourite” twitter mobile app.  I’ll add more as I come up with more ideas and wishes.  Let me know what ideas you think are important or ones you think don’t work for you.

UPDATE: Here’s another feature I’d like it to have as well:

• Email tweets or add to social bookmarking service like del.icio.us

Building off my previous entry Posting to WordPress via BlackBerry I’ve updated my wp-mail.php script to work with twitter_updater. It’s not the best solution but it works for now.

require_once(ABSPATH.'/wp-content/plugins/twitter_updater/twitter_updater.php');

do_action('publish_phone', $post_ID); // current update to WP

if (function_exists(vc_doTwitterAPIPost)) { // if twitter_updated exists: update
	$twitterURI = "/statuses/update.xml";
	$twit = $post_title . ' ( ' . get_permalink($post_ID) . ' )';
	$sendToTwitter = vc_doTwitterAPIPost('status='. $twit, $twitterURI);
	echo "\n<p>" . sprintf(__('<strong>Twitter:</strong> %s : %s'), $sendToTwitter, wp_specialchars($post_title)) . '</p>';
}

I also made some other updates to compensate for some changes to my email system which now base64 encodes part of the message. Here I added this code to split at the “base64″ marker instead or “quoted-printable” marker:

if (strpos($content, "Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64") !== false) {
	$content = explode('Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64', $content);
	$base64 = true;
}
$content = $content[1];
if ($base64) $content = base64_decode($content);