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="https://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.
By Andrew Ramsden July 6, 2010 - 7:36 pm
As suspected, Twitter will not offer to shorten your URLs at all.
By Andrew Ramsden July 6, 2010 - 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.
By Andrew Ramsden July 8, 2010 - 7:43 am
Twitter iPhone app… not so much (Thanks Ben).