A few alert readers have written us over the last few weeks, spotting dead links in Twitter posts. If you aren’t careful on Twitter, you could be sharing dead links.
Twitter has started automatically shortening links with its “http://t.co” domain. No matter what kind of link shortening service you use (like Bitly or TinyURL) , your shortened link will be processed through the Twitter domain. As you can see by the image embedded above, the shortened links appear in a new format on Twitter. If you copy and paste that tweet, you could end up with a dead link.
Over email, AllTwitter co-editor Shea Bennett explained how all this link shuffling can create a dead link: “The problem is the new Twitter interface strips out the ‘http://’ part of links. The copy isn’t aware it’s a hyperlink, and often Twitter.com interprets it as plain text.”
He offered this solution to the problem: “When you copy and paste the only solution to guarantee parsing across all Twitter clients is to always re-add ‘http://’ ahead of the shortened link (or make sure it’s there already). That said, it entirely depends on where you copy and paste from. If you do this from Twitter.com back into a new tweet on Twitter.com the URL passes properly. But it can be problematic from Twitter.com to other clients, and vice versa.”