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I don't understand the whole thing with venture capitalists and their
insistence that purchasing a company is the only way to integrate two different
services. They seem to not understand the whole Web 2.0/mashup thing they all
go on about.
 
Case in point - I saw this today:
 
"So if a trending tweet contains a link pointing to any of these sources,
then file it under ‘news’. Here’s another reason why Twitter should be
buying Bit.ly in the first instance."
<http://econsultancy.com/blog/3918-how-can-twitter-dig-itself-out-of-hashtag-hell>
 
Ignore the strange last four words. But the idea that Twitter needs to
buy bit.ly in order to determine if bit.ly links are pointing to news or blog
sources is very strange. You must get into the whole marketing/VC/business
mindset in order to think that this is how you do it.
 
Because, as a geek, here's how I determine where a shortened URI is pointing to:
 
ricoeur:~ tom$ curl --head http://bit.ly/5VO7H
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved
Server: nginx/0.7.42
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2009 11:04:17 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Connection: keep-alive
Location: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QjH3gqkE_s
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Length: 304
 
Yeah, guess what: the HTTP specification's 30x redirect headers and the Location:
header are significantly more intelligent than your average Web 2.0 blogger.