Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Items tagged twitter, urls

Filters: twitter × urls × Sorted by date


What do Twitter and Gawker think of hash-bangs URLs?

As of December 2013 (and potentially much earlier, I don’t have the exact dates) both Twitter and a Gawker have moved away from hash bang URLs, so my guess is they turned out not to be a good idea.

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What is the most efficient way to lookup an object (e.g. a user) by only a string?

Yes—an index on a varchar column is exactly how you would implement this.

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Is there a way of tracking shortened URLs with Twitter streaming API?

Think about it like this: the whole point of the Twitter streaming API is to get you the tweets as soon after they are posted as possible. If the API were to provide access to the lengthened URLs, it would have to delay emitting a Tweet on to the stream until a resolver had gone through each shortened URL in the tweet and checked to find what it redirects to. This would mean that the speed with which the streaming API could deal out tweets would be dependent on the speed of the third party servers that serve up the redirects. I doubt Twitter would ever want to implement this.

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tr.im is “discontinuing service”. “However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009.Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.”—these statements seem to contradict themselves. Will tr.im URLs in tweets stop working after December 31st or not? Any chance they could hand the domain over to the Internet Archive? At any rate, this is exactly why centralised URL shorteners are a harmful trend. # 10th August 2009, 11:06 am