Digital Waves

Twitter has become a global phenomenon, major news today was that Ashton Kutcher was the first twitterer to reach one million followers (making him the number one twit). In beating CNN to this milestone, Twitter has shown that it is here to stay and that micro social media definitely has a place alongside main stream media outlets in breaking news stories across the world.

However Twitter also has a lot to answer for, from the way it forces me to condense the nuanced intricacies of my day to day life into McNugget sized tweets to the way it renders fully grown adults incapable of actually communicate as such instead regressing to overgrown adolescent teenagers.

“catch ya l8r tweeps, like omg he was so nom nom”

I know we have limited space to play with but come on people, would you talk like this in real life?

But my biggest issue with twitter by far is short links. URL shortening services have been around for a few years now, their original purpose was to prevent long and cumbersome URLs from broken by poor email clients that for some unknown reason decided they should impose a line break on anything over a certain length.

It may seem harmless enough but lurking ominously beneath the surface is the potential for carnage. Everytime I’m forced to click on one of these links I feel like i’m taking my life into my hands, wondering where my final destination will be and what hidden dangers lurk beneath this convenient link.

It’s like in taking a “step forward” in social networking, we’ve been whisked back to the dark days of the internet in the 90’s, frames are back, and no one knows where there links take them, net transparency 0, scam artists 1.

Twitter obviously recognise the problem and now expand some (but not all) of the short links in the twitter search, but the rest of twitter still remains a dangerous land full of potential short link deception.

However, twit-roll me once shame on you, twit-roll me twice shame on you, which is why I now always preview my short links at expandmyurl.com to make sure I don’t get any nasty surprises when I click on a short link. So join the fight back, say no to short links and yes to knowing where your link takes you!