Twitter: we control your redirects

Starting this morning, Twitter seems to have pre-empted all URL-shortening services in favor of t.co for all Tweets sent through its network. I noticed this not only because all the tweets I follow are t.co infested, but also because Tweets I sent this morning shorted via bit.ly were re-shortened via t.co.

This is not exactly what Twitter said it was doing. The most recent (August 5) posting to the developer blog by (“developer advocate”) Taylor Singletary announced:

Beginning August 15th, when a user tweets or sends a direct message containing a URL 20 characters long or greater (the length of URLs wrapped with t.co), the URL will automatically be converted to a t.co-wrapped link. We will eventually wrap all links, regardless of length, but until then there's nothing you need to do to support this change. When we're ready to wrap all links, we'll give you plenty of time and make another announcement.

OK, so it’s 2 days early. But more importantly, the 20-character limit means that effectively all links are being rewritten: bit.ly, lat.ms, nyi.ms. (Note that the “http://” costs everyone 7 characters, whereas “www.” only costs 4)

Interestingly, the tweets are being sent with the t.co, those tweets link to the t.co if you copy the link on the Twitter website, but are being shown using the original URL. So the tweet I sent this morning from @openITstrat looked like this when I sent it:

NYT obit: CCNY prof Daniel McCracken (1930-2011), who wrote best-selling Fortran and Cobol texts http://nyti.ms/rjixBb (I owned both)

but on my client looks like this:

NYT obit: CCNY prof Daniel McCracken (1930-2011), who wrote best-selling Fortran and Cobol texts http://t.co/PpFFjXV (I owned both)

On Twitter.com, it looks like this:

@openITstrat
Joel West
NYT obit: CCNY prof Daniel McCracken (1930-2011), who wrote best-selling Fortran and Cobol texts nyti.ms/rjixBb (I owned both)

with the nyti.ms actually a t.co link if you click on it. (Of course, the website tweets are shown in the extra-ugly “New Twitter” that I fought to avoid for months.)

TechCrunch said that this week would include a test of the new service, but this appears to be no longer a test.

As is common for Web 2.0 companies that use indirect monetization (NB: Google, Facebook), Twitter is being disingenuous as to their reasons for eliminating the customer choice and control over URL links. It’s not about saving 2 characters, and it’s really not about URL security. (The fact that they can remap a URL into a t.co and back shows that they can automatically detect what URL is being linked).

After Twitter announced its plans a year ago, Alistair Croll summarized the real reasons in a posting on the O’Reilly site:

Twitter has been open with its data from the start, and widely available APIs have created a huge variety of applications and fast adoption. But by making their platform so open, Twitter has fewer options for monetization.

The one thing they can do that nobody else can -- because they're the message bus -- is to rewrite tweets in transit. That includes hashtags and URLs. Twitter could turn #coffee into #starbucks. They could replace a big URL with a short one. And that gives them tremendous power.

Twitter recently announced a new feature that makes this a reality. The t.co URL shortener -- similar to those from bit.ly, awe.sm, and tinyURL -- might seem like a relatively small addition to the company's offering. But it's a massive power shift in the world of analytics because now Twitter can measure engagement wherever it happens, across any browser or app. And unlike other URL shorteners, Twitter can force everyone to use their service simply because they control the platform. Your URLs can be shortened (and their engagement tracked by Twitter) whether you like it or not.

In other words, Twitter wants to control all the web analytics for URLs sent via its service, as a way to increase it monetization to support its planned IPO.

Is there some reason why Twitter can’t just admit to this in an honest way, rather than wrap it in a rhetoric of psuedo-customer concern? Is there a shortage of honesty among Web 2.0 companies? (NB: Facebook, Google, etc.)

People know that free services have to be paid for somehow. Unlike Lt. Kaffee, I can handle the truth and I imagine most customers can too.

Delusions of openness

Howard Stringer of Sony claims a deathbed conversion to open standards. In his interview with Nikkei Electronics Asia last month, he was quoted as saying:

Customers will refuse to accept it unless the technology is open. Youth in particular really dislikes closed technologies, closed systems and the like. …

Sony hasn't taken open technology very seriously in the past. Its CONNECT music download service was a failure. It was based on OpenMG, a proprietary digital rights management (DRM) technology. At the time, we thought we would make more money that way than with open technology, because we could manage the customers and their downloads.

This approach, however, created a problem: customers couldn't download music from any Websites except those that contracted with Sony. If we had gone with open technology from the start, I think we probably would have beaten Apple Inc of the US.

There was a time when it made sense to divide the market with closed technology, and monopolize a divided market, but that's just not an effective strategy any more. In the Internet universe, there are millions of stars - millions of options that have been created through open technology.

I would agree that Sony was the epitome of a closed technology company, but otherwise the rest of the answer (including the factually inaccurate claims of Apple DRM) was just plain wrong. (Intentionally misleading or merely confused, I can’t tell).

(Let me suspend for now the whole question of what is an “open” standard — the subject of my 2006 book chapter in the Greenstein and Stango book. Suffice it to say some standards are more open than others, but few are fully open or fully closed.)

From where I sit, the higher water mark for open standards was about 15 years ago, when the dominance of open standards was clearcut. We had IETF standards for TCP/IP, SMTP and FTP (with W3C standards for the WWW) that were as open as any standard ever: available free on the Internet for all to use, royalty-free. We had 802.3 (with 10Base5, 10Base2 and 10Base-T) from the IEEE.

Today, the young people Stringer mentions spend hundreds of dollars to buy content for proprietary videogame platforms from Sony and others. They communicate over proprietary VoIP protocols from an eBay subsidiary on a PC with a proprietary OS (either one) running on a proprietary microprocessor.

If they should happen to have bought a Sony digital camera or camcorder, they will be used Sony’s proprietary (and royalty bearing) Memory Stick flash memory card and soon will be recording video in its proprietary AVCHD format.

Now they could buy a Blu-Ray player from any number of players, but a fraction of every player (and disc) purchase goes to Sony and it partners in the patent cartel. Worrying about the June 12 (claimed) digital transition, they then buy an HDTV with an estimated $23 going to patent holders.

Similarly, if they have a cellphone, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a GSM or WCDMA phone (using standards from ETSI/3GPP) or a cdmaOne/cdma2000 phone (using standards from Qualcomm/3GPP2) — with a 5+% royalty (before cross-licenses) going to IP holders.

In their 1999 book Information Rules, Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian noted that users will prefer open standards but buy proprietary ones if sellers make it worth their while (think of a “teaser” rate for lockin costs). Firms can lock in customers if they are careful not to get too greedy. Varian is now putting these ideas into practice as chief economist of Google.

So Stringer’s claims to the contrary, we are passing through an era of semi-open standards when firms prefer to support open standards over their rival’s proprietary standards, but much prefer to establish their own proprietary standards (think Memory Stick.) We’ve had semi-open standards for 20 years — think OpenVMS — and except for an occasional open source platform, I think semi-open will remain the norm. I’d be glad to fly to Tokyo to give a tutorial on the subject if anyone’s listening.

Lies, dam lies, and advertisements

A phrase attributed to Disraeli (or perhaps Twain) is “'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

It was the key quote from one of my favorite books of my childhood math geek days: Darrell Huff’s classic How to Lie With Statistics, which (Wikipedia claims) is the most widely read statistical text of the past 50 years. Alas, despite Huff’s wide distribution, such lies (such as truncated graphs) remain popular, particularly in the popular press.

Lying seems to be taken for granted in advertising. People can say things that aren’t true (“I lost 20 pounds in one week”) because that’s marketing license and thus people discount such claims. Still, the FTC has rules that says ads are deceptive if by omitting key information, a reasonable person would be misled. So nowadays the trick is to add small fine print, briefly flashed on the screen.

Even within this context, the AT&T ad of the past several months has been bothering me. It claims “best coverage”. But of course, that’s not true - according to Consumer Reports, AT&T places fourth after Verizon, Alltel and T-Mobile. Call quality is not a new problem for AT&T Wireless (née Cingular).

The footnote says “based on global coverage.” (Of course, AT&T has no coverage outside the U.S., just roaming agreements with other carriers). So for the fraction of minutes used by the 1% of Americans who use cellphones overseas, you might get better cell phone coverage. That’s assuming you’re willing to pay outrageous roaming rates, although it’s not clear how AT&T has better coverage than T-Mobile or a dual-mode CDMA phone. Meanwhile, the claim that a dad will get better coverage on lover’s lane because his AT&T phone roams to London is not misleading, it’s a lie.

The other lie — a new one this weekend that pushed me over the edge — is the claim that the latest Narnia movie is “even better than the first.” The first cognitive disconnect came with the review in my morning paper, which called it cliche and predictable due to hollow characters and wooden acting. However, the weekend onslaught of Disney ads is claiming Prince Caspian is “triumphant” and “the must-see film of 2008”. This is traditional movie hype, but when I can’t read the names of the critics or the periodical on my 26" TV, I got even more suspicious.

Sure enough, the only recognizable publication among the list of favorable “Caspian” quotes was CNN. Except that critic Gorman Woodfin is not a critic at CNN (founded by Ted Turner who called Christians “losers”), but instead is at CBN (founded by Pat , who wants Christians to take over the country). Given the status of C.S. Lewis as an iconic Christian philosopher and the Narinia novels as Christian allegory, the difference matters.

In strategy, we often expect ethical corner-cutting from schlocky little companies (or young high-growth companies like Worldcomm). Here AT&T and Disney are just the opposite. Both are Fortune 100 companies, and Disney is a top 10 global brand, even if the US-only AT&T is not.

So is this ethical decay in the executive suite? Another rationalization that “everybody does it”? I don’t know the explanation, but it’s not encouraging.