Just landed on a couple articles concerning a bit of a sneaky move from social bookmarking giant Digg here and here. While I don't think this directly affects any links I've posted on Twitter, it could have a massive effect on some people and on how Digg users view the company from now on.

photo credit: hmvh

Basically what they've done here was to get people to use the Digg url shortening service to shorten links for use in Twitter (twitter only allows 140 characters per tweet hence the need to shorten urls). The normal behaviour was that the Digg shortened url pointed to the original link when someone clicked on it, but now unless the person clicking the link is logged in to Digg, the link gets hijacked and redirects directly to Digg.com giving the site itself lots of backlinks. I'm sure a lot of people who have used the Digg url shortening service through whatever means will not be happy about this. Imagine you have 1,000 people clicking your twitter links and landing on the Digg.com homepage. Another thing to consider is that never mind not being logged in to Digg, lot's of people clicking these links won't even have a Digg account. This just doesn't look good for the original Tweeters who supplied the links. My own opinion is that it's bad practice and a mistake from Digg. What do you think?

One solution to this before another url shortening service does the same kind of thing is to buy a short domain name and develop your own url shortening service!

As I mentioned in my previous poat, I added links to social bookmarking sites and said I'd also be joining them. So I'm just posting the code here to complete my claim for my blog on Technorati. Here's my Technorati Profile. Claimed!

photo credit: Nikita Kashner