The news that Twitter is releasing it’s “official” URL shortener, http://t.co, is already sweeping across the interwebs and I think the move is both a strategic and helpful one.
From their announce post they mentioned how this would provide an extra layer of security so that more “spammy” and harmful links would be filtered out:
Since early March, we have been routing links within Direct Messages through our link service to detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of malware, phishing, and other dangers.
Any link shared in a Direct Message has been wrapped with a twt.tl URL. Links reported to us as malicious are blacklisted, and we present users with a page that warns them of potentially malicious content if they click blacklisted links.
We want users to have this benefit on all tweets.
Neat! I personally don’t mind having some software (as long as it’s well developed) do a lot of the filtering for me so that I don’t get hacked randomly by a link on Twitter.
But it made me think critically about privacy concerns and how ministries provide links to their properties…
URL Shorteners for your Church?
This new change made me wonder if ministries and churches will start or begin to use custom URL-shorteners for their properties. Would this even be a significant value-add for people?
The effort required isn’t too much at all – heck, you can sign up for BIT.ly’s Pro account in a matter of seconds:
But would this help others be more strategic with their tweet-clicks? Would it provide that additional level of “security” and privacy management for others? Would it even be worth the relatively-small amount of effort?
Not sure, but it wouldn’t surprise me if a number of ministries “go for it”.
Thoughts?
chris says
We’ve already gone for it – mostly b/c our url is so long, giving out any specific links to our site is ridiculous. I installed YOURLS on our shortened url site and it works great. I’ve applied a redirect to the root so you have to know the subdirectory it’s installed in to get to the login screen (although it’s not that difficult to guess). With some stats, it’s a great service that’s free – all you need is a domain and a database.
Joshua says
We’re in the process of implementing YOURLS as well. We’ve gone from a 21 character domain (incl. the .org) down to 6. It’s been a great help. Originally looked at Bitly.pro, but since it is a shared hash space, that wasn’t feasible for us.
herbhalstead says
We added one recently. It isn’t as “short” as most. But that is the “side” benefit for us. We want people to trust that a link we post is legit. So, we added a shortening service to our server and limited the creation of links to our staff.
Daniel says
Hey, i’m in high school and considering going into the IT or programming profession.
So basically, I was wondering what do you do in an IT job? Do you do any programming?
I googled a lot, and haven’t been able to find any job description. So I figured I’d just ask the horse’s mouth straight(or something like that =p)
Brad Zimmerman says
I am trying to figure this out myself. Is a url sortner better then good old long urls for normal people? do sortened urls scare people away who don’t use twitter?
For my site ChurchMediaDesign.tv i currently have wordpress making my urls as small as possible. So no dates or extra info in page names.
However, I just bought cmd.tv, so I am trying to figure out if I should just use that is a sortener or as my normal web address. Or can you do both? hmmmm
Any thoughts Jon and others?
John Saddington says
i think that would be awesome! you have a very long domain already, so that would help save space on tweets.
Brad Zimmerman says
Would it be better as just a shoterner? i haven’t every moved an entire site to a new domain seems a bit scary.