Twitter Myth: URL Shorteners Save Space - Busted! | Small business news; tips; networking

Posted by adrianjock under Social Media
From http://www.adrianjock.com 3484 days ago
Made Hot by: bloggerpalooza on May 12, 2015 11:17 pm

A shorter URL has fewer characters than a longer one. So it makes sense to say that URL shorteners save space...

But is that true when we move from theory to practice?

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Comments

Written by Inspiretothrive
3480 days ago

Hi Adrian, Finally made it back here :) So why were they created for non-Twitter purposes? Was it for SEO purpose? That was my question.

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Written by adrianjock
3480 days ago

Hi Lisa,

1) No, they weren't invented for SEO purposes. They were created in order to shorten long URLs. That's why they were called URL shorteners :)

2) Who needed short URLs?

For example, more than 10 years ago I used these services frequently in order to replace in emails long URLs. Otherwise, long URLs used to be trimmed in two useless pieces by the recipient's email client.

Some of my customers used these services in order to shorten the URLs from short ezine ads (such as top sponsor ads or ezine classified ads). Those ads had a limited length. By using short URLs, the advertisers had more space for the text of the ad (the longer the URL, the less space for the text)

Then Twitter was launched. Before the launch of Twitter's own t.co service, in the early days, URL shorteners such as TinyURL and then bit.ly were used on Twitter in order to get extra space ;-)

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Written by Inspiretothrive
3484 days ago

Very interesting observation Adrian as usual. Why all the url shortener services? Is there another reason behind them?

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Written by adrianjock
3484 days ago

Hi Lisa, the second question is related to the first question. And the first question doesn't look like being complete - sorry, I don't understand it. Could you please refine it?

If the meaning was, "Why all the URL shortener services were created?" - the answer is that they were not created for Twitter purposes. Such services existed before Twitter's launch.

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