Twitter’s link-sharing limits
One of the main things that I do on Twitter these days, and that the people I follow do, is share links. Sharing links is one of the primal activities on the Web. It was one of the first things people did once they started building Web pages; it was one of the two driving forces behind the rise of blogging (the other was unedited self-expression).
Twitter was built for people to share “status messages” — the answer to the “What are you doing?” question — but most of the people I follow don’t use it for that very much. They use it to comment on news events and to share links they like. Because of this disjunction between original design and “street use,” I find that Twitter gets only one thing about sharing links right — and pretty much everything else wrong.
What it gets right is immediacy. Twitter is fantastic when there’s a breaking story and you want to see what links people are handing around. It’s a much speedier way to tune in to what’s happening (Senator Stevens — guilty!) than RSS feeds or reloading a news site’s front page.
But Twitter privileges “now”-ness over everything else. You can’t tag your links. You can annotate them only if you can say what you wish in under 140 characters (actually, under 140 minus the length of the URL). You can’t even see what the actual URL is, most of the time, since people use URL-shorteners to save space. There is really no other way to say this: For a service that is so widely used to share links, Twitter really sucks at it.
Delicious has long offered the best combination of features for simple link saving and sharing (it’s got space for annotations and a spiffy new interface). You can use Delicious to “follow” (subscribe to) specific tags, but not, as far as I can tell, to follow specific users. (If I’m behind on Delicious’s feature set, enlighten me!) You can use Delicious-generated RSS feeds for that, but we’re getting pretty far afield — nothing remotely approaching Twitter’s simplicity.
So here’s an opportunity for Twitter, or for someone else, if the Twitter team is too busy: Offer a service very similar to Twitter but optimized for link-sharing. (FriendFeed is cool but it’s trying to do so many other things at the same time that I don’t think it suits what I’m talking about.) Make it easier to share links real-time; expose the actual URL; give us some rudimentary tools for organizing the links; and watch something cool grow.
Of course, Twitter has the critical mass of usage right now, and that’s not going away. But surely there’s room for improvement.
Wordyard RSS feed
October 27th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Delicious does do this – network is for people, and subscriptions are for tags. If you have “friends” in your network you can see their links aggregated here – http://delicious.com/network/yournamehere
October 27th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
I’ve been using delicious for a while now, and just started experimenting with twitter.
I wonder if people generally share links more freely on twitter — posting links to transient items that they wouldn’t bother saving on delicious. I tend to bookmark things in delicious that I think I might be worth looking up later, and I think of it more for my own sake than to point others at something. I don’t really think of delicious as a realtime feed as much as twitter seems to be, and I don’t follow my (small) network on delicious.
With twitter, I’ve only posted a handful of items and am following a few people, so don’t have a strong sense of how it is for link sharing. (And while I like the aesthetics of a short tinyurl or bit.ly url, I don’t like how they hide the destination and that they kind of break the distributed web.)
But that’s just thoughts from my limited pattern of usage and experience with both services.
October 27th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
[...] Scott Rosenberg has an interesting post looking at whether Twitter could be improved as a link sharing tool in a way that could improve on social bookmarking site Delicious. [...]
October 27th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
Thanks, right, it’s “network” on delicious. It says something about either Delicious or me that I’ve been using it for, what, six years or something like that and I could neither remember nor find the feature… In any case, I wonder how widely it’s used.
In email I’m informed about the Firefox LongURL expander, which helps deal with the URL-shortener issue:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8636
I also fully understand that from the perspective of Twitter management, they’ve got this elegantly simple service, and a million people advising them to add a million new features that would collectively ruin the elegant simplicity. Still: I wish linking worked better.
October 27th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
In addition to tags you can also subscribe to anybody’s bookmarks with http://delicious.com/rss/{username} — following links from people I respect is my primary way of keeping up with the mass of material out there.
October 28th, 2008 at 7:05 am
[...] has some great advice for Twitter: So here’s an opportunity for Twitter, or for someone else, if the Twitter team is too busy: [...]
October 29th, 2008 at 10:18 am
Mitch K tweeted this Tinyurl expander for Mozilla:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8636
October 31st, 2008 at 5:21 am
I have faith that the Twitter API developer crowd will answer your call. I’m not sure how to make Twitter “easier to share links real-time,” but here are some ideas that might tide you over until Twitter incorporates your wish list.
Third party tools like http://longurl.org expand shortened URLs. Perhaps someone could create a (Greasemonkey-powered?) Firefox plugin to automatically do this while you browse.
To “watch something cool grow,” there is http://www.microblogbuzz.com and, more to your interest in links, http://twitturls.com .
For “rudimentary tools for organizing the links,” you can use FriendFeed as your Twitter client (read http://cli.gs/QDruP0 ) and organize your friends and followers — not links — with FriendFeed’s groups and rooms.
I’ve recently found a new love for Delicious, BECAUSE of the power of its “network” and RSS feeds. Yesterday I started using it, along with Yahoo! Pipes, to create a daily roundup of journalism links on my blog … http://cli.gs/YrrSVq
March 4th, 2009 at 8:12 am
Our company is new to the whole internet sales. We are trying to build our link popularity to our site. http://www.lightingtheweb.com. Can this be done in a short time or does this take years to accomplish
April 23rd, 2009 at 12:31 am
This article delighted me more than you can think of. We have been building a specific tool for this for 1 year now, link2friend.com (not out yet) – also to accommodate the need to use link sharing service to replace polluted emails in corporations.
We should be launching very soon so let me know if you wish to try it out as private beta user and even help us to further develop it.
October 13th, 2009 at 3:43 am
[...] It’s slowly replacing RSS. What a terrible news since RSS was also designed to be decentralized. Moreover, a RSS stream can embed full article, while Twitter is just indirections and redirections. Everything depends on another service. For instance, if bit.ly goes down, Twitter dies. Talking about shorteners: URLs used to have a meaning, a value, but they ruined it — stupid limit. [...]