Twitter should give you tinyURL previews
Just a quick photoshop mockup I made, but wouldn’t it be great? What do you think @twitter, could you make it happen?
Leave a comment on this post if you’d also like to see it happen and maybe I’ll send a note over to twitter to let them know. Thanks – ThinkSketch
P.S. This post is partly in reply to these posts asking if url shorteners are evil.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/06/are-url-shorteners-a-necessary-evil-or-just-evil
http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners.html
URL shorteners aren’t evil, we just haven’t made one that is any good yet. A good shortURL service should create a standard preview image that applications could then pop-up from the shortURL. This would actually give the user MORE information than a URL by itself. (Yes, I am working on creating this service – let me know if you like the idea).
In the meantime, Twitter could hack something useful together by at least crawling the shortURL links to show a preview of the real link. And it wouldn’t take much more to take a screenshot preview of the site as well…
Really nice idea. I like it. You never really know where your going with a tiny url so a preview would be useful.
You can read some of my Twitter suggestions here: http://willwalmsley.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/ok-so-i-joined-twitter/