Are TweetBacks Dead?
A little bit less than a year ago I created an open source CFC and companion Mango Blog plugin called SweetTweets that would search for shortened links to your blog entries on Twitter and display any tweets found in a manner similar to TrackBacks. (Note that this wasn't my idea, Dan Zarella invented and pioneered it, I just made a ColdFusion version.) At the time, I was really excited about the project and it seemed to be fairly popular; it even got included in the BlogCFC core, which made my week.
Unfortunately, I'm at a bit of a crossroads. I personally view TweetBacks as nearly dead, if not completely dead. Functionally, they still work the same as they did when I originally released SweetTweets in January of 2009. What's changed is market share. In May, Twitter switched their integrated URL shortening service from TinyURL to Bitly, and within days Bitly's market share overtook TinyURL. You can get the latest statistics at Tweetmeme but the rankings from the last 24 hours have Bitly in 1st place with over 57% of shortened urls, and TinyURL in a distant 2nd place with a mere 6.85%.
Why Bit.ly is bad for TweetBacks
The biggest problem is that Bitly doesn't repeat a short URL. If I shorten the URL http://www.google.com with Bitly, I get http://bit.ly/14d7yE. I bet that if you do the same thing, you won't get the same short URL. This behavior is bad for tweetbacks because we rely on being able to predict the shortened url and search for it. If everyone gets a different short url, then we can't predict what it will be, and thus we can't search for it. Your tweetback is out there, we just can't find it.
This isn't to say that Bitly is evil or anything. I'm sure they have their reasons -- chief among them is probably being able to track click statistics, and if everyone gets the same short url then there's no easy way to tell whose post of that url was the source of the click. That alone could give Twitter something to monetize, so while I'm not particularly fond of the move from TinyURL to Bitly, I understand it.
Where do we go from here?
One option is to just kill SweetTweets. That probably won't happen. Instead, I will probably release an update that pares down the list of supported url shorteners to just TinyURL and Is.Gd. That means that a majority of potential tweetbacks will still be un-searchable, and therefore NOT found and NOT listed on your blog. Unfortunately, we can't just support every URL shortener under the sun (that keeps 1 unique short url per long url), because the twitter search API has a length limit; so we can only support the top N. Right now that's TinyURL and maybe 1 or 2 others.
I wish it didn't have to come to this, but it has. I thought about asking if anyone is aware of a way to reverse-lookup shortened bitly urls, but even if we could, in a practical sense we would run out of room in just a few links. I'm a little sad, but I guess this is the best we can do with what we've got.
in Mango | My projects | Twitter Posted 2010-01-04 10:57
4 responses:
I'd say my thoughts on tweet backs are much more global though. In 2010 I'm /really/ simplifying things on my sites and am moving towards the removal of many third party add-ons. Things like the Last.fm badge, Flickr viewer, and more will probably be removed from my blog.
Now, if all the URL shorteners provided an API call where you could submit the full URL and get any and all of the shortened URLs they issued for that long address, that would make things a lot more managable.
@Brian: That's pretty much what I thought. Thanks for the feedback.
Again, though, a solution that requires buy-in by Twitter and/or all the URL shortener services.
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