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Test support for short URL auto-discovery

Short URL autodiscovery sounds like a good idea to me. The easiest way for a developer to integrate this mechanism is to use the link element in your document’s <head>, e.g:

<link rel="shorturl" href="http://irama.org/673" />

Or if you are using WordPress there are few handy plugins that do this automatically (for example: Short link maker and Shorter links).

So what?

But who’s going to know you’ve gone to all this trouble? How far has support for auto-discovery penetrated? I think it would be great if social media client applications would offer my short URL to users when they choose to shorten URLs within their posts, but I can’t find much documentation about which if any apps will pick up and use short URLs exposed in this way.

Go forth and test

This post can serve as a test, and a collection point for data, leave a comment if you have tested a new client application (include the version if known), and I’ll do the same.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 6th, 2010 at 7:29 pm and is filed under Identifiers, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Test support for short URL auto-discovery”

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  1. Andrew Ramsden Says:
    July 6th, 2010 at 7:36 pm

    As suspected, Twitter will not offer to shorten your URLs at all.

  2. Andrew Ramsden Says:
    July 6th, 2010 at 7:38 pm

    TweetDeck 1.3 for iPhone doesn’t auto-discover the URLs. And TweetDeck 0.34.3 for desktop allows you to specify which short URL service to use, but does not perform auto discovery either.

  3. Andrew Ramsden Says:
    July 8th, 2010 at 7:43 am

    Twitter iPhone app… not so much (Thanks Ben).

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