14 DAY TRIAL // Feedly has decided to retire the URL shortener in order to make people feel safer when browsing the Internet.
“It is the right thing to do for users, because people who receive those links in emails, SMSs and social media posts will be able to tell by looking at the URL where it leads and who created the content. It will also shave a few hundred milliseconds from the experience of loading the links,” the team explains, indicating that one fewer redirect would just cut down the time.
The feature is getting the axe along with the latest update for both Feedly web and mobile, as the company finds that this is the right thing to do.
Aside from the fact that users would actually know what type of content they would find at the end of the line and whether the site they are about to visit can be trusted or not, Feedly wants to allow other apps and search engines to leverage metadata about the content being shared and offer a better, richer experience.
In short, when links are hidden behind the Feedly shortener, just like behind any other URL shortener, search engines have a hard time figuring out what data is behind it and this can hurt site ranking, for instance.
“We also empower users to more effectively promote their favorite voices,” writes Feedly’s CEO, Edwin Khodabakchian.
As he points out, there would be no Feedly without the power and openness of the Web so they’re from now on going to be more careful going forward to respect and re-enforce what makes the Web an incredible medium.
Feedly users seem to be quite happy with the change, according to several opinions posted in reaction on Twitter.
One incident shows what the big issues are
Over the past weekend, there’s been an incident related to a popular link shortener, namely Bitly. What happened was that Google safebrowsing, the feature that seeks to protect people from clicking on to sites that are full of malware or just shady, in general, flagged all Bit.ly links as dangerous.
That made any link that has ever been shared via Bit.ly to become unusable for people using Chrome and Firefox, where the safebrowsing feature is deployed.
Bitly quickly moved to a new type of URL to help users still work the tool. It wasn’t long before Google fixed things up.
The issue, it seems, was with the fact that Bit.ly had been flagged for malware on several occasions. Of course, given the nature of the service that was impossible. Basically, the only way for such a thing to happen is if people hid malicious links behind the URL shortener.