WebRev Blog

Twitter has definitely been the social network of the week, thanks to a  certain Congressman who has learned an important lesson the hard way about the difference between a tweet and a direct message (the first is public, the second is theoretically private).  There isn't much to say about this that hasn't already been said in the last few days.

In an apparent effort to get the attention of the public back on its REAL purpose, Twitter is reminding everyone about its awesome 140-character-at-a-time message delivery, by re-introducing its URL shortening service.  Condensing one's posts to 140 characters that make sense takes some practice and finesse, and this gets even more difficult when you want to share a link with a long URL.  For this reason, people have been using URL shortening services like bit.ly, and ow.ly. 

Twitter used to automatically shorten longer URLs using bit.ly, which made helped to make bit.ly extremely popular.  It also got to the point where there were so many new bit.ly URLs being created every day, that bit.ly URLs were really that short anymore. 

Eventually, Twitter rolled out t.co, which is Twitter's own URL shortener.  While it has been in use for several months, it is being hailed this week as a new feature. 

The downside to using this one is that right now, there are no stats available, as there are with several of the other URL shorteners.  For those who measure Twitter "success" in terms of retweets and replies, however, this shortener works just fine.  The upside is that what is visible to users is a 19-character truncated version of the original URL.  The advantage to this is that people can see the name of the website you have linked to.  With most of the other shortening services, you have no idea what site you'll be visiting until you get there, and this has left the door wide open for spam and phishing sites. 

So now, feel free to share your links, and enjoy the full use of your remaining 121 characters!

Jennifer Pointer (e-mail) is in Tulsa, OK. She promotes a simple, a low-tech approach to effective online profile management, search engine optimization and social networking. 
 

I was posting a link from the Washington Post to Twitter this weekend, and needed to shorten the link URL, to fit into Twitter's 140-character space limit.  In the past, I've used Bit.ly for this service, my favorite one of many URL-shortening services.  Normally, instead of a URL that includes the original domain name and title of the article I'm posting (e.g. http://washingtonpost.com/very-long-name-of-article), which takes up most of my space limit, I end up with something short and sweet (e.g. http://bit.ly/aBcDeF), which only uses about 20 precious character spaces of my 140 available.

Well, this time, when shortening my Washington Post article, I ended up with this URL: http://wapo.st/aX9JM3  It's still 20 characters, but is clearly a Washington Post URL.  Upon further investigation, I found that organizations who have signed up for Bit.ly's "pro" service have their URLs shortened to a custom shortened URL.

At first I panicked.  My favorite reason for using Bit.ly is that you can copy and past any Bit.ly URL into your browser window and add the "+" (plus) symbol at the end of it, and quickly view the traffic on that URL.  Much to my relief, I found that the service is still available on these custom shortened URL.  Very cool. 

It works on Facebook, too.  For example, if I want to create a shortened URL for Coca-Cola's photo page on Facebook, I end up with this: http://on.fb.me/hPmbnB.  If I post that on Twitter or somewhere else, I can easily track how many people have used that link by using this link:  http://bit.ly/hPmbnB+ (notice the plus sign).  These statistics do not reflect how many people have visited that page, but specifically number of people who have followed the link I just created to that page.

The Bit.ly/Pro page also lists Peps (pep.si), Yahoo! (yhoo.it), Foursquare (4sq.com), and C-Span (cs.pn) among its list of famous early adopters.

Also see:

• Bit.ly.Pro: Create Short URLs with Your Own Domain
• How will Bit.ly work with Twitter's Link Wrapping
• A Little Secret about Link Shortening

Jennifer Pointer (e-mail) is in Tulsa, OK. She promotes a simple, a low-tech approach to effective online profile management, search engine optimization and social networking. 
 

Today, I'd like to share a couple of URLs I've seen displayed on TV commercials, which I believe are confusing for the intended audience.  There's no point in advertising your website if the folks you're trying to attract aren't going to be able to find you using the web address you gave them.

So, if you're going to be publishing your web address on TV, in print media, on signs, or on business cards, here are a couple of mistakes to avoid.

The first example shown above is for a retirement investment website.  It's a great website, actually.  It's too bad that so many people in the "zone" will never find it.  The target demographic is people within five years of retirement, and many of whom who still probably do not know that you AREN'T supposed to put SPACES in between the words on web addresses.  If they type the URLs as you see them in the ad, they'll get an error.  At least they can find the site easily using a simple Google search.

I can't even say that much for the next example, however.  This is an upcoming made-for-TV movie about a real-life news story.  The advertising department thought they would get creative, and make the title of the movie look like a URL.  Did they just spend a few bucks, and actually buy a domain name that would work?  Oh, no, they just made up a URL.

Yes, most of the people in their target demographic (young women) will know the//craigslist.killer is not a real web address.  I was only about half paying attention when I saw the commercial the first time, and actually checked to see if ".killer" was a new domain extention, like ".me" or ".co" (it isn't).  Unfortunately, typing this URL or the name of the movie into a Google search will yield more results about the original news story than about the movie.

So, don't make these mistakes when displaying your URLs.  Instead, try separating distinguishing the parts of your web address by color, or by delineation, or by strategic capitalization of words.  You can even get cute, and make your "dot" a yo-yo.  Just make sure that if people who actually want to visit your site, they'll be able to do so by typing in your web address as they see it published.

 

Jennifer Pointer (e-mail) is in Tulsa, OK. She promotes a simple, a low-tech approach to effective online profile management, search engine optimization and social networking.