Link Shortening, Topic Trending, etc.

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Username: [rootwile]

What feature would you like to see implemented?  Be as specific as
possible.
This isn't a completely thought out idea or feature, but I thought it'd put it 
out there:
I think it could be a good idea - emphasis on could - for plans to shorten all 
links when saving a plan, either using its own link-shortener or using one like 
bit.ly or goo.gl.  I see two reasons to consider this:
1) Shorter links = more space for plans content
2) Would allow for analytics tracking of what showing what links are most 
popular and most linked to.  (This is the part I think could be cool).

More generally, I think features that show trending (alternatively, some kind 
of textual analysis that found trending topics could also do this on text other 
than links), might be a good place for the expansion of plans features that 
enhance what plans is about rather than changing it.

Why is this a good use of coding time?
Plans is about sharing ideas, and sharing information (often in the form of 
links).  Allowing people to better and more quickly see what is going on 
overall on plans could be really cool.  This function could also create more 
links and sharing between concentrated "cliques" of plans with no or few 
bridging links.

I don't really know how these features would be implemented and I think there 
could be some downsides, but I thought I'd throw this idea out.  Am I really 
just suggesting that plans become twitter?  I didn't mean to...

Original issue reported on code.google.com by rootwi...@gmail.com on 26 Nov 2010 at 9:18

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I can't see much argument for (1) - text is cheap, plans are fairly long.

(2) could allow for some interesting possibilities. Some of the further-out 
benefits of this could be complementary to #213.

Some amount of analysis could happen without using a link shortener - for ex. 
we could parse stored plans to find links and compile most-linked-to stats and 
the like. What we couldn't do without an intermediary would be tracking how 
many people click on a link.

Possible objections to shortened links:
 * Not everyone may be interested in having their exit traffic from plans tracked. I imagine this would specially be an issue if we were storing analytics with a 3rd party. Is there an easy way to give users an opt-out? I can't decide if the opt-out should come from the author or the reader.
 * Content with shortened links is locked into the continued existence of the shortening service. We could mitigate this by leaving the unshortened links in the text that users edit. This way, personal archives would still contain the original links.
 * The annoyance of not being able to see a link's true destination URL. Could be somewhat mitigated by storing it in the title attribute (to give a tooltip) or something along those lines.

None of these are dealbreakers, but they do need some consideration. More 
importantly, it's a cool idea, but this change isn't worth doing unless someone 
is going to put in the coding time to make some nifty community features out of 
it. I don't expect that will be me, and based on our current levels of 
developer participation I wouldn't hold your breath.

Original comment by ian.gree...@gmail.com on 16 Dec 2010 at 7:59

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Definitely not holding my breath.  I think I more just wanted to throw it out 
there and see what other people thought.  I suspect someday, Plans will 
actually evolve a bit more, and I wanted to make sure this idea was sitting 
around to be found.

Original comment by rootwi...@gmail.com on 18 Dec 2010 at 12:55