The Jakarta Globe today this week introduced its own shortened URL to help identify and track links that goes to its stories from Twitter.

I’m a huge fan of custom URLs because it tells you where your link goes. While shorteners like goo.gl, bit.ly and tinyurl are fine for the general public, these private, branded ones like aol.it, tcrn.ch, engt.co, on.mash.to and jglo.be are much better for content publishers as well as everyone else.

While publishers will be able to track the links, readers will be assured that they won’t be duped into going to another site.

Of course, then we come across Twitter for Mac that automatically shortens any URL that gets manually entered into it to t.co. Whoever thought this would be a great idea needs to be put into a blender. By the way, this URL issue with the app deserves a post on its own.

[update] Turns out the link on each of @thejakartaglobe’s tweet leads not to individual articles but to the category page the article belongs to. This puts a major dampener on the excitement front and pulls out the, “what the fuck were you thinking?” banner.