With humans, it’s easy to imagine telepathy, but the implementation is a bit tricky, as we have yet to invent the transmission media to allow this. We tend to be stuck with the imperfections of language.

As for twitter, to maximize its reach, you minimize its function and cost, and live with the resultant lingua franca. Network hardware and protocols are boring, but they matter immensely. Legacy may suck, but it’s free. Just ask any dsl technologist why there is still no fibre to the home (Hint: compression algorithms cost less).

Oh, and neurologists and psychologists out there…, does ANYONE know why we are so interested in what others are having for lunch? If we had this answer, we’d have been able to predict the rise of twitter, understand the business case and pay to build out networks to accommodate more sophisticated functions.

Short URLs are good for blogs that don’t allow traditional HTML hyperlinks and good for situations where a URL contains wonky special characters (like quotes, etc) that cause software to freak out. When you don’t have cut-and-paste between two machines but you want to save a URL for later then a short URL can be typed in (you could also email it, but maybe you don’t have convenient email at hand or whatever).

See also, http://pastebin.com/ and similar services — popular when people have some big multi-line chunk that they want to share with others without pushing an overly verbose message.

blogbrevity – thanks for both your links and comments. Will be taking a look shortly…

It would be nice to have an option of a hyperlink on the API though, I will give you that. It’ll happen but it won’t happen soon. Now that they’re so hugemongus they have to cater to the tardoids who won’t even know what a hyperlink is until they make some spazzy little video of cardboard people sending hyperlinks in tweets.

It seems that SMS integration is the biggest issue. I find this particularly interesting for one main reason – this innovation seems to be focused on making something work for a legacy technology, rather than optimizing the latest and greatest. Most innovations I’ve seen, particularly online / in the Web 2.0, tend to go the other way.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out – I do understand some of the benefits in (say) developing economies. But I believe, for many people with relatively recent devices, this whole URL shortening thing represents a step backwards.

Keeping messages raw (as in, no hidden code) and short is important for Twitter. All hidden code increases bandwidth usage. We all know Twitter goes down quite often. I don’t think increasing their data traffic is a good idea. URI shorteners help reduce data traffic. That’s a good idea. Good Twitter clients will reveal the URI to you before navigating, giving you a more transparent choice.

However, my biggest support for URI shorteners is that you can use them to track data. Shorteners such as tr.im and is.gd provide usage statistics so you can track what followers are interesting in when you tweet.

Perhaps very few in the Twitterverse use SMS as the primary channel, even on PDAs. (But SMS remains the key standard in mobile technology in developing countries.)

So, URL shortening is a typical technical compromise created when extending an existing medium.

Another point: Web 2.0 in general exposes functionality to users in a programmatical fashion. The notion of exposing badges, widgets, XML data and URL shorteners enables simple and accessible customization.

This would mean you could publish the message: “I enjoy the videos on this [site]” using the markup: “I enjoy the videos on this site:http://vimeo.com” or even by embedding an anchor tag.

The only people affected by any change like this would be the SMS users, but it turns out that most cell users of twitter simply use the webpage or a client.

On URL shorteners: I’ve started to use them across all forms of social media – I generally don’t like the clutter of long links and the only universal tool across all websites that I can use to resolve this is a shortener (I use the one built into Tweetdeck that automatically does it). Yes I lose the value of the link’s name for people who want to preview what they’re clicking on, but if i’m describing it before I link it then this doesn’t really matter to me. I think the other main benefit is that passing your content through an intermediary lets you easily store and manage your content, and then share that data in aggregate with the world, similar to a Delicious, Digg or StumbleUpon. If you simply hyperlink something on Twitter, the data is local, whereas if the content is recorded through an intermediary (in a quick, user friendly way), it opens up a broad range of sources that can be managed and manipulated into a way that benefits users. For example, I got this link from your Twitter and came to Wikinomics, where there is now a thin toolbar from Hoot Suite. From there I can with 1 click, find other top tweets, rate your content, and other useful things that wouldn’t be possible without a source of information to draw from. If I take it a step further and go to Hoot Suite’s website, it looks like there’s a number of neat tools that take the sum of all users’ data, and translate it into a form that helps me immerse myself in the web.

I agree that there’s some downsides to URL shorteners though, especially in masking the destination of your source and potential stats recording issues for things like search engine crawlers (my auto URL shortener sometimes re-shortens URLs from competing services – I suspect that this can create a big mess if you’re trying to track this). In the end I don’t think that URL shorteners are critical, but they add an extra layer of manageability to an Internet that has grown very broad and it can be a good way of surfacing quality media. I think the real concern is one of standards – because everyone wants to get into the game, there’s so many competing services that all the user data gets divided in a way that becomes less and less meaningful. I would be willing to bet that in the near future someone will come up with a good way to unify all these data silos under one banner in order to access and redistribute the total data of all sources.

Vincent – Denis is suggesting that twitter allow users to insert hyperlinks, which would allow you to link to any URL with any number of characters. Just like when you’re reading a web page or blog post and links are blue and underlined – not the whole URL.

If twitter could implement that and include bit.ly like analytics, that would be great.

No. The hyperlink is nothing more than a visual representation of a long piece of code. And that long piece of code counts toward the character count in Twitter.

The URL for your article is 120 characters long. Add the requisite html tag and you left with 6 characters.

That’s why URL shorteners are so important.